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ADDRESSES 



AND 



O R A T I O N S 



UF 



RUFUS CHOATE, 



FOURTH EDITION. 



BOSTON: 
LITTLE, BROWN, AND COMPANY. 

1883. 






Entered according to Act of Congress, in the year 1878, by 

LITTLE, BROWN, AND COMPANY, 

In the Office of the Librarian of Congress, at "Washington. 

W 25 . to 



CAKBRTDGE : 

PRESS OF JOHN WILSON AND SON. 



CONTENTS. 



PAOK 

The Importance of Illustrating New England 
History by a Series of Romances like the 
Waverley Novels. Delivered at Salem, 1833 . . 1 

The Colonial Age of New England. An Address 
delivered at the Centennial Celebration of the Settle- 
ment of the Town of Ipswich, Mass., Angiist 16, 1834, 46 

The Age of the Pilgrims the Heroic Period of our 
History. An Address delivered in New York before 
the New England Association, December, 1843 ... 74 

The Power of a State developed by Mental Cul- 
ture. A Lecture delivered before the Mercantile 
Library Association, November 18, 1844 106 

The Position and Functions of the American Bar, 
as an Element of Conservatism in the State. 
An Address delivered before the Law School in Cam- 
bridge, July 3, 1845 133 

The Eloquence of Revolutionary Periods. A Lec- 
ture delivered before the Mechanic Apprentices' Li- 
brary Association, Februaiy 19, 1857 1G7 

Address delivered in South Danvers, at the Dedi- 
cation OF the Peabody Institute, September 29, 
1854 202 

Remarks before the Circuit Court on the Death 

of Mr. AVebster 222 



IV CONTENTS. 

PAGE 

A Discourse commemorative of Daniel Webster. 

Delivered before the Faculty, Students, and Alumni of 
Dartmouth College, July 27, 1853 241 

Speech before the Young Men's Whig Club of 
Boston, on the Annexation of Texas. Delivered 
in the Tremont Temple, August 19, 184:4 334 

Speech on the Judicial Tenure. Delivered in the 

Massachusetts State Convention, July 14, 1853 . . . 357 

Speech delivered at the Constitutional Meeting 

IN Faneuil Hall, November 26, 1850 396 

Speech delivered in Faneuil Hall, October 31, 1855, 419 

Speech " on the Political Topics now prominent 
before the Country." Delivered at Lowell, Mass., 
October 28, 1856 440 

American Nationality. An Oration delivered in Bos- 
ton on the Eighty-second Anniversary of American 
Independence, July 5, 1858 480 

Speech on the Birthday of Daniel Webster, Janu- 
ary 18, 1859 » 517 



ADDP.ESSES AND OEATIONS. 



THE IIVIPORTAXCE OF ILLUSTRATIXG NEW-ENG- 
LAND HISTORY BY A SERIES OF ROMANCES 
LIKE THE WAYERLEY NOVELS. 

DELIVERED AT SALEM, 1833. 



The history of the United States, from the planting 
of the several Colonies out of which they have 
sprung, to the end of the war of the Revolution, 
is now as amply written, as accessible, and as authen- 
tic, as any other portion of the history of the world, 
and incomparably more so than an equal portion of 
the history of the origin and first ages of any other 
nation that ever existed. But there is one thing 
more which every lover of his country, and every 
lover of literature, would wish done for our early his- 
tory. He would wish to see such a genius as Walter 
Scott, (^exoriatur aliquis^^ or rather a thousand such 
as he, undertake in earnest to illustrate that early 
history, b}^ a series of romantic compositions, '* in 
prose or rhyme," like the Waverley Novels, the Lay 
of the Last Minstrel, and the Lady of the Lake, — 
the scenes of which should be laid in North America, 
somewhere in the time before the Revolution, and 
the incidents and characters of which sliould be 

1 



2 IMPORTANCE OF ILLUSTRATIXG 

selected from the records and traditions of that, our 
heroic age. He would wish at length to hear such a 
genius mingling the tones of a ravishing national 
minstrelsy with the grave narrative, instructive re- 
flections, and chastened feelings of Marshall, Pitkin, 
Holmes, and Ramsay. He would wish to see him 
giving to the natural scenery of the New World, and 
to the celebrated personages and grand .ncidents of 
its earlier annals, the same kind and degree of inter- 
est which Scott has given to the Highlands, to the 
Reformation, the Crusades, to Richard the Lion- 
hearted, and to Louis XL He would wish to see him 
clear aw^ay the obscurity which two centuries have 
been collecting over it, and unroll a vast, comprehen- 
sive, and vivid panorama of our old New-England 
lifetimes, from its sublimest moments to its minutest 
manners. He w^ould wish to see him begin with the 
landing of the Pilgrims, and pass down to the war of 
Independence, from one epoch and one generation to 
another, like Old INIortality among the graves of the 
unforgotten faithful, wiping the dust from the urns 
of our fathers, — gathering up whatever of illus- 
trious achievement, of heroic suffering, of unwaver- 
ing faith, their history commemorates, and weaving it 
all into an immortal and noble national literature, — 
pouring over the whole time, its incidents, its actors, 
its customs, its opinions, its moods of feeling, the 
brilliant illustration, the unfading glories, which the 
fictions of genius alone can give to the realities of 
life. 

For our lawyers, politicians, and for most purposes 
of mere utility, business, and intellect, our history 
now perhaps unfolds a sufficiently " ample page." 



NEW ENGLAND HISTORY. 3 

But, T confess, I should love to see it assume a form in 
which it should speak directly to the heart and affec- 
tions and imagination of the whole people. I should 
love to see by the side of these formidable records of 
dates, and catalogues of British Governors, and Provin- 
cial acts of Assembly, ^ these registers of the settle- 
ment of towns, and the planting of churches, and 
convocation of synods, and drawing up of platforms, — 
by the side of these austere and simply severe narratives 
of Indian wars, English usurpations, French intrigues, 
Colonial risings, and American independence ; — I 
should love to see by the side of these great and 
good books about a thousand neat duodecimos of the 
size of Ivanhoe, Kenilworth, and Marmion, all full of 
pictures of our natural beauty and grandeur, — the still 
richer pictures of our society and manners, — the lights 
and shadows of our life, — full of touching incidents, 
generous sentiments, just thoughts, beaming images, 
such as are scattered over every thing which Scott has 
written, as thick as stars on the brow of night, and give 
to everything he has written that imperishable, strange 
charm, which will be on it and embalm it for ever. 

Perhaps it is worthy even of your consideration, 
whether this is not a judicious and reasonable wish. 
I propose, therefore, as the subject of a few remarks, 
this question: — Is it not desirable that a series of 
compositions of the same general character with the 
novels and poems of Scott, and of equal ability, 
should be written in illustration of the history of the 
North- American United States prior to the peace of 
1783? 

I venture to maintain first, that such works as these 
would possess a very high historical value. They 



4 IMPORTANCE OF ILLUSTRATING 

would be valuable for the light they would shed upon 
the first one hundred and fifty years of our Colonial 
existence. They would be valuable as helps to his- 
tory, as contributions to history, as real and authori- 
tative documents of history. They would be valuable 
for the same reason that the other, more formal and 
graver records of our history are so, if not quite in 
the same degree. 

To make this out, it may be necessary to pause a 
moment and analyze these celebrated writings, and 
inquire what they contain, and hoAV they are made 
up. It is so easy to read Scott's Novels that we are 
apt to forget with how much labor he prepared himself 
to ^vr^te them. AVe are imposed on, startled perhaps, 
by the words novel and poem. We forget that any 
one of them is not merely a brilliant and delightful 
romance, but a deep, well-considered, and instructive 
essay on the manners, customs, and politicpJ condi- 
tion of England or Scotland, at the particular period 
to which it refers. Such is the remark of a foreign 
critic of consummate taste and learning, and it is 
certainly just. Let us reverently attempt to unfold 
the process — to indicate the course of research and 
reflection — by which they are perfected, and thus to 
detect the secret not so much of their extraordinary 
power and popularity as of their historical value. 

He selects then, I suppose, (T write of him as 
living ; for though dead, he still speaks to the whole 
reading population of the world,) firsts the country 
in which he will lay the scenes of his action, — 
Scotland, perhaps, or merry England, or the beauti- 
ful France. He marks off the portions of that 
country within which the leading incidents shall be 



NEW ENGLAND HISTORY. 5 

transacted, as a conjurer draws the charmed circle 
with his wand on the floor of the Cave of Ma^ric. 
Then he studies the topography of the region — its 
scenery, its giant mountains, its lakes, glens, forests, 
falls of water — as minutely as Malt^ Brun or Hum- 
boldt ; but choosing out with a poet's eye, and 
retaining with a poet's recollection, the grand, pict- 
uresque, and graceful points of the whole tran- 
scendent landscape. Then he goes on to collect and 
treasure up the artificial, civil, historical features of 
the country. He explores its antiquities, becomes 
minutely familiar with every city and castle and 
cathedral which still stands, and with the grander 
ruins of all which have fallen, — familiar Avith every 
relic and trace of man and art, — down even to the 
broken cistern which the Catholic charity of a former 
age had hewn out by the way-side for the pilgrim to 
drink in. He gathers up all the traditions and le- 
gendary history of the place, — every story of " hope- 
less love, or glory won," — with tiie time, the spot, 
the circumstances, as particularly and as fondly as if 
he had lived there a thousand years. He selects the 
age to which his narrative shall refer, — perhaps that 
of Richard or Elizabeth, or Charles H., or of the 
rebellion of 1745 ; and forthwith engages in a deep 
and discursive study of its authentic history and 
biography, — its domestic and foreign politics; the 
state of parties; the character and singularities of tlie 
reigning king and his court, and of the prominent per- 
sonages of the day ; — its religious condition, the wars, 
revolts, revolutions, and great popular movements ; all 
the predominant objects of interest and excitement, and 
all which made up the public and out-of-door life and 



6 IMPORTANCE OF ILLUSTRATING 

history of that particular generation. He goes deeper 
still; — the state of society; the manners, customs, 
and employments of the people; their dress, their 
arms, and armor ; their amusements ; their entire 
indoor and domestic life ; the rank and accomplish- 
ments of the sexes respectively ; their relations to 
each other ; the extent of their popular and higher 
education ; their opinions, superstitions, morals, ju- 
risprudence, and police, — all these he investigates as 
earnestly as if he were nothing but an antiquarian, 
but with the liberal, enlightened, and tolerant curi- 
osity of a scholar, philosopher, philanthropist, who 
holds that man is not only the most proper but most 
delightful study of man. Thus thoroughly fur- 
nished, he chooses an affecting incident, real or im- 
aginary, for his ground-work, and rears upon it a 
composition, — which the mere novel reader will 
admire for its absorbing narrative and catastrophe ; 
the critic for its elegant style, dazzling poetry, and 
elaborate art; the student of human nature for its 
keen and shrewd views of man — " for each change 
of many-colored life he draws ; " the student of his- 
tory for its penetrating development and its splendid, 
exact, and comprehensive illustration of the spirit of 
one of the marked ages of the world. And this is a 
Waverley Novel! 

Perhaps I am now prepared to restate and main- 
tain the general position which I have taken, — that 
a series of North- American or New-England Waver- 
ley Novels would be eminently valuable auxiliaries 
to the authoritative written history of New England 
and of North America. 

In the first place, they would embody, and thus 



NEW ENGLAND HISTORY. 7 

would fix deep in the general mind and memory of 
the whole people, a vast amount of positive informa- 
tion quite as authentic and valuable and curious as 
that which makes up the matter of professed history, 
but whioh the mere historian does not and cannot 
furnish. They would thus be not substitutes for 
history, but supplements to it. Let us dwell upon 
this consideration for a moment. It is wonderful, 
when you think closely on it, how little of all which 
we should love to know, and ought to know, about a 
former period and generation, a really standard his- 
tory tells us. From the very nature of that kind of 
composition it must be so. Its appropriate and ex- 
clusive topics are a few prominent, engrossing, and 
showy incidents, — wars, — conquests, — revolutions, 
— changes of dynasties, — battles and sieges, — the 
exterior and palpable manifestations of the workings 
of the stormy and occasional passions of men mov- 
ing in large masses on the high places of the world. 
These topics it treats instructively and eloquently. 
But what an inadequate conception does such a book 
give you of the time, the country, and the people to 
which it relates ! What a meagre, cold, and unen- 
gaging outline does it trace ; and how utterly de- 
ficient in minute, precise, and circumstantial, and 
satisfactory information! How little does it tell 
you of the condition and character of the great body 
of the people, — their occupations, — their arts and 
customs, — their joys and sorrows! — how little of 
the origin, state, and progress of opinions, and of 
the spirit of the age ! — how misty, indistinct, and 
tantalizing are the glimpses you gain of that old, 
fair, wonderful creation which you long to explore ! 



8 IMPORTANCE OF ILLUSTRATING 

It is like a vast landscape painting in which nothing 
is represented but the cloven summit and grand 
sweep of the mountain, — a portion of the sounding 
shore of the illimitable sea, — the dim distant course 
of a valley, traversed by the Father of Rivers two 
thousand miles in length, — and which has no place 
for the enclosed corn-field, — the flocks upon a thou- 
sand hills, — the cheerful country-seat, — the village 
spires, — the church-yard, — the vintage, — the har- 
vest-home, — the dances of peasants, — and the Cot- 
ter's Saturday night ! 

Now, the use, one use, of such romances as Scott's, 
is to supply these deficiencies of history. Their 
leading object, perhaps, may be to tell an interesting 
story with some embellishments of poetry and elo- 
quence and fine writing and mighty dialogue. But 
the plan on which they are composed requires that 
they should interweave into their main design a 
near, distinct and accurate, but magnified and orna- 
mental view of the times, people, and country to 
which that story goes back. They are, as it were, 
telescope, microscope, and kaleidoscope all in one, if 
the laws of optics permit such an illustration. They 
give you the natural scenery of that country in a 
succession of landscapes fresh and splendid as any in 
the whole compass of literature, yet as topograj)hi- 
cally accurate as you will find in any geography or 
book of travels. They cause a crowded but exact 
and express image of the age and society of which 
they treat to pass before you as you see Moscow or 
Jerusalem or Mexico in a showman's box. They 
introduce genuine specimens, — real living men and 
women of every class and calling in society, as it 



NEW ENGLAND HISTORY. 9 

was then constituted, and make tliem talk and act 
in character. You see their dress, their armor, and 
their weapons of war. You sit at their tables, — 
you sleep under their roof-tree, — you fish, hunt, and 
fowl with them. You follow them to their employ- 
ments in field, forest, and workshop, — you travel 
their roads, — cross their rivers, — worship with them 
at church, — pledge them at the feast, and hear their 
war-cry in battle, and the coronach which announces 
and laments their fall. Time and space are thus an- 
nihilated by the power of genius. Instead of read- 
ing about a past age, you live in it. Instead of 
looking through a glass darkl}^ at vast bodies in the 
distance, — at the separate, solitary glories of a sky 
beyond your reach, — wings as of the morning are 
given you ; you ascend to that sky and gaze on their 
unveiled present glories. It is as if you were placed 
in the streets of a city buried 1800 years ago by the 
lava of a volcano, and saw it suddenly and com- 
pletely disinterred, and its whole, various population 
raised in a moment to life, — in the same attitudes, 
clothed upon with the same bodies, wearing the 
same dresses, engaged in the same occupations, and 
warmed by the same passions, in which they per- 
ished ! It would carry me too far to illustrate these 
thoughts by minute references to all Scott's poetry 
and romances, or to attempt to assort the particulars 
and sum up the aggregate of the real historical in- 
formation for which we are indebted to that poetry 
and those romances. Go back, however, at random, 
to the age of Richard of the Lion Heart, — the close 
of the twelfth century, the era of chivalry, the Cru- 
sades, and almost of Magna Charta. Read of it first 



10 IMPORTANCE OF ILLUSTRATING 

in the acute and elegant Hume and the laborious 
Lingard; and then open the splendid romance of 
Ivanhoe and see, not which most interests you, but 
which relates most vividly, most minutely, and most 
completely, the authentic history of the England of 
that troubled yet glorious day. The character and 
peculiarities of the chivalrous Richard, — his physi- 
cal strength, — his old English good-nature and com- 
panionable and convivial qualities and practices, — 
his romantic love of adventure and peril, and of the 
rapture of battle (certaminis gaudia) relieved and 
softened by his taste for troubadour music and song, 

— the cold, jealous, timid temper of his brother John, 
at once an ambitious usurper and an unprincipled 
voluptuary, — the intriguing politics of his court, — 
his agency in procuring Richard's long imprisonment 
in Germany, and his sudden start of terror on hear- 
ing of his escape and return to England to claim his 
throne, — the separation of the English people of 
that era into two great distinct and strongly marked 
races, the Saxon and the Norman, — the characteris- 
tic traits and employments of each, — the relations 
they sustained to each other, — their mutual fear, 
hatred, and suspicion, — the merry lives of Robin 
Hood and his archers in the forest, — the pride and 
licentiousness of the bold Norman barons, and the 
barbaric magnificence of their castles, equipage, and 
personal decoration, — the contrasted poverty and 
dignified sorrow of the fallen Saxon chiefs, — the 
institutions and rites of a still gorgeous but waning 
chivalry, — the skilful organization, subtle policy, 
and imposing exterior of the order of the Templars, 

— the pride, pomp, and circumstance of the gilded 



NEW ENGLAND HISTORY. 11 

and sounding era of the Crusades, — these topics, 
this information, — not the well-feigned fortunes of 
Isaac, Rebecca, Athelstane, Wilfred, — give to the 
surpassing poetry and painting of this unequalled 
romance a permanent and recognized historical value, 
and entitle it to a place upon the same shelf with 
the more exclusive and pretending teachers of Eng- 
lish history. 

Let me remind you that Scott is not the only 
writer of romance who has made his fiction the vehi- 
cle of authentic and useful information concerning 
the past, and thus earned the praise of a great his- 
torian. Let me remind you of another instance, the 
most splendid in literature. The Iliad and Od3'Ssey 
of Homer, — what are they but great Waverley 
Novels ! And yet what were our knowledge of the 
first 400 years of Grecian history without them! 
Herodotus, the father of history, devotes about 
twenty-five duodecimo lines to the subject of the 
Trojan Wanderer ; and without meaning any disre- 
spect to so revered a name, — so truly valuable a 
writer, — I must say that this part of his narrative 
is just about as interesting and instructive as an ac- 
count in a Castine newspaper, that in a late, dark 
night a schooner from Eastport got upon Mt. Desert 
Rock, partly bilged, but that no lives were lost, and 
there was no insurance. Unroll now, by the side of 
this, the magnificent cartoons on which Homer has 
painted the heroic age of the bright clime of Battle 
and of Song ! Abstracting your attention for a mo- 
ment from the beauty and grandeur and consummate 
art of these compositions, — just study them for the 
information they embody. We all know that critics 



12 IMPORTANCE OF ILLUSTRATING 

have deduced the rules of epic poetry from these 
inspired models ; and Horace tells us that they are 
better teachers of morality than the Stoic doctors, — 
Chrj^sippus and Crates. But what else may you 
learn from them ? The ancient geography of Greece, 
— the number, names, localities, and real or legen- 
dary history of its tribes, — the condition of its arts, 
trades, agriculture, navigation, and civil policy, — its 
military and maritime resources, — its manners and 
customs, — its religious opinions and observances, 
and mythology and festivals ; — this is the informa- 
tion for which we are indebted to an old wandering, 
blind harper, — just such another as he who sang the 
Lay of the Last Minstrel to the ladies of Newark 
Castle. This is the authority on which Potter has 
compiled his Antiquities, and Mitford the first three 
chapters of his History. And surely, to use the 
words of an elegant writer, surely " such an apoca- 
lypse of life" — its energetic passions, its proud 
desires, its quiet enjojmients, its sincere affections, 
its wasting griefs, its towering course and mournful 
end — "was never communicated by another human 
imagination." 

It is time now to turn to our early history, and 
consider more directly in what way and to what 
extent our Iliad and Odyssey, and Ivanhoe and Ken- 
ilworth, when they come to be written, will help to 
illustrate and to complete and to give attraction to 
that history. Select then, for this purpose, almost 
at random, any memorable event or strongly marked 
period in our annals. King Philip's War is as good 
an illustration as at this moment occurs to me. What 
do our historians tell us of that war? and of New 



NEW ENGLAND HISTORY. 13 

England during that war ? You will answer sub- 
stantially this : It was a war excited by Philip, — a 
bold, crafty, and perfidious Indian chief dwelling at 
Bristol, in Rhode Island, — for the purpose of extir- 
pating or expelling the English colonists of Massa- 
chusetts, Plymouth, Connecticut, and New Haven. 
It began in 1675 by an attack on the people of 
Swanzey, as they were returning on Sunday from 
meeting. It ended in August, 1676, at Mount Hope 
by the death of Philip, and the annihilation of his 
tribe. In the course of these two years he had suc- 
ceeded in drawing into his designs perhaps fifteen or 
twenty communities of Indians, and had at one time 
and another, perhaps, eight or ten thousand men in 
arms. 

The scenes of the war shifted successively from 
Narraganset Bay to the northern line of Massachusetts 
in the valley of the Connecticut River. But there 
was safety nowhere ; there was scarcely a family of 
which a husband, a son, a brother, had not fallen. 
The land was filled with mourning. Six hundred 
dwellino'-houses were burned with fire. Six hun- 
dred armed young men and middle-aged fell in 
battle ; as many others, including women and chil- 
dren, were carried away into that captivity so full 
of horrors to a New-England imagination ; the cul- 
ture of the earth was interrupted ; the prayers, labors, 
and sufferings of half a century were nearly for ever 
frustrated. 

Such is about the whole of what history records, 
or rather of what the great body of our well-educated 
readers know, of the New England of 1675, and of 
the severest and most interesting crisis through 



14 IMPORTANCE OF ILLUSTRATING 

which, in any epoch, the colony was called to pass. 
Now, I say, commit this subject — King Philip's War 

— to Walter Scott, the poet, or the novelist, and, 
you would see it wrought up and expanded into a 
series of pictures of the New England of that era, 

— so full, so vivid, so true, so instructive, so moving, 
that they would grave themselves upon the memory, 
and dwell in the hearts of our whole people for ever. 
How he would do this, — precisely what kinds of 
novels and poems he would write, — 

" What drugs, what charms, 
What conjuration, and wliat mighty magic" 

he would deal in to effect this purpose, it would be 
presumptuous in me to venture fully to explain. 
Some imperfect and modest conjectures upon this 
point, however, I hope you will excuse. 

In the first place, he would collect and display a 
great many particulars of positive information con- 
cerning these old times, either not contained at all 
in our popular histories, or not in a form to fix the 
attention of the general reader. He would spread 
out before you the external aspects and scenery of 
that New England, and contrast them with those 
which our eyes are permitted to see, but which our 
fathers died without beholdino'. And what a con- 
trast! The grand natural outline and features of 
the country were indeed the same then as now, and 
are so yesterday, to-day, and always. The same 
waves dashed high upon the same " stern and rock- 
bound coast ; " the same rivers poured their sweet 
and cheerful tides into the same broad ba}^ ; the 
same ascending succession of geological formations, 



NEW ENGLAND HISTORY. 15 

— the narrow, sandy belt of sea-sliore and marsh 
and river intervals, — the wider level of upland, — 
the green or rocky hill, — the mountain baring its 
gray summit to the skies, — met the eye then as 
now ; the same east wind chilled the lincrerinsr 
spring; the same fleecy clouds, bland south-west, 
yellow and crimson leaf, and insidious disease, waited 
upon the coming in of autumn. But how was it in 
that day with those more characteristic, changeful, 
and interesting aspects which man gives to a country ? 
These ripened fruits of two hundred years of labor 
and liberty ; these populous towns ; this refined and 
affluent society ; these gardens, orchards, and corn- 
fields ; these manufactories and merchant-ships, — 
where were they then? The whole colonial popu- 
lation of New England, including Massachusetts, 
Plymouth, Connecticut, New Haven, Maine, New 
Hampshire, at the breaking out of that war, has been 
variously estimated at from 40,000 to 120,000. I 
suppose -that 80,000 may be a fair average of these 
estimates, — a little less than the present population 
of the single county of Essex. They were planted 
along the coast from the mouth of the Kennebec to 
New Haven, upon a strip of country of a medium 
width, inwards from the sea, of forty or fifty miles, 

— a great deal of which, however, was still wholly 
unreclaimed to cultivation, and much of it still oc- 
cupied by its original and native owners. This belt 
of sea-coast — for it was no more than that — was 
the New England of 1675. Within this belt, and up 
the interval land of some of the rivers — the Merri- 
mack, the Charles, the Connecticut — which passed 
down through it to the sea, a few settlements had 



16 IMPORTANCE OF ILLUSTRATING 

been thrown forward ; but, as a general fact, the 
whole vast interior to the line of New York, Ver- 
mont, and Lower Canada, including in Massachusetts 
a part of the counties of Essex, Middlesex, Worcester, 
Old Hampshire, Berkshire, was a primeval wilder- 
ness, beneath whose ancient shadow a score of Indian 
tribes maintained their fires of war and council, and 
observed the rites of that bloody and horrible Pagan- 
ism which formed their only religion. 

On this narrow border were stretched along the 
low wooden houses with their wooden chimneys ; 
the patches of Indian corn crossed and enclosed by 
the standing forest ; the smooth-shaven meadow and 
salt marsh ; the rocky pasture of horses, sheep, and 
neat cattle ; the fish-flakes, lumber-yards, the fishing 
boats and coasting shallops ; West India and Wine 
Islands merchant-ships ; the meeting-houses, wind- 
mills, and small stockade forts, — w hich made up 
the human, artificial, and visible exterior of the New 
England of that era. Altogether the whole scene, 
in its natural and in its cultivated elements, was in 
exact keeping with the condition and character and 
prospects of that generation of our ancestors. It was 
the dwelling place of the Pilgrims, and of the chil- 
dren of the Pilgrims. There lay — covered over as 
it were, partially sheltered, yet not wholly out of 
danger, like the sowing of a winter grain — the 
germs of this day's exceeding glory, beauty, and 
strength. There rose, plain, massive, and deep-set, 
the basement stories of our religious, civil, and lit- 
erary institutions, beaten against and raged around 
by many a tempest and many a flood, — yet not fall- 
ing, for their foundation was a rock. Fifty years of 



NEW ENGLAND HISTORY. 17 

continual emigration from England, and of general 
peace and general health, had swelled the handful 
of men who came passengers in The Mayflower to 
Plymouth, and in The Abigail to Salem, and in The 
Arbella to Boston, into an infant peoi3le. Inde- 
pendence of the mother country had hardly yet en- 
tered the waking or sleeping dreams of any man ; 
but, as against all the world besides, they had begun 
to utter the language, put on the habits, and assume 
the port, of a nascent and asserted sovereignty and 
national existence. Some portion of the great work 
which they were sent hither to do they had already 
done. They had constructed a republican, represen- 
tative government. They had made provision for 
the mental and moral culture of the rising nation. 
Something of the growth of a half-century of indus- 
try, — "immature buds, blossoms fallen from the 
tree, and green fruit," — were beginning to gladden 
the natural and the moral prospect. Still the general 
aspect of the scenery of that day, even if surveyed 
from one of those eminences which now rise in so 
much beauty around Boston, would have seemed to 
the senses and imagination of a beholder wild, 
austere, and uninviting. The dreams of some of the 
sanguine, early settlers were by this time finished. 
It had been discovered by this time that our soil 
contained neither gold nor silver, and that although 
we could purchase very good wine at Fayal or 
Madeira, with the proceeds of the fish we sold at 
Bilboa, we were not likely to quite rival Hungary, 
as Master Grave, the engineer, in 1629, thought we 
should in the domestic article. The single damask 
rose grew wild by the walls, as Mr. Higginson says 

2 



18 IMPORTANCE OF ILLUSTRATING 

it did in his time ; but all felt by the year 1675 that 
it was, on the whole, a somewhat ungenial heaven 
beneath which their lot was cast, yielding nothing 
to luxury and nothing to idleness, but yet holding 
out to faith, to patience, and labor, freedom and 
public and private virtue, the promise of a latter day 
far off of glory, honor, and enjoyment. Every thing 
around you spoke audibly to the senses and imagina- 
tion of toil and privation, of wearisome days and 
sleepless nights, of serious aims, grave duties, and 
hope deferred without making the heart sick. You 
looked upon the first and hardest conflicts of civilized 
man with unreclaimed nature and uncivilized man. 
You saw all around you the blended antagonist mani- 
festations and insignia of a divided empire. Indian 
wigwams and the one thousand houses of Boston 
sent up their smoke into the same sky. Indian 
canoes and the fishing and coasting craft and mer- 
chantmen, loading for Spain and Africa and the 
West Indies, floated upon the same waters. English 
grain and grasses grew among the blackened stumps 
of the newly fallen forest. Men went armed to their 
fields, to meeting, and to bring home their brides 
from their father's house where they had married 
them. It was like the contest of Winter and Spring 
described by Thomson, or like that of the good and 
evil principle of the Oriental superstitions ; and it 
might at first seem doubtful which would triumph. 
But when you contemplated the prospect a little 
more closely, — when you saw what costly and dear 
pledges the Pilgrims had already given to posterity 
and the new world, — when you saw the fixtures 
which they had settled into and incorporated with 



NEW ENGLAND HISTORY. 19 

its soil, the brick college at Cambridge, and the 
meeting-houses sending up their spires from every 
clearing, — when you surveyed the unostentatious 
but permanent and vast improvements which fifty 
years had traced upon the face of that stern and 
wild land, and garnered up in its bosom, — when 
you looked steadfastly into the countenances of those 
men, and read there that expression of calm resolve, 
high hope, and fixed faith, — when you heard their 
prayers for that once pleasant England as for a land 
they no longer desired to see ; for the new world, 
now not merely the scene of their duties but the 
home of their heart's adoption, — you would no 
longer doubt that, though the next half-century 
should be, as it proved, a long, bloody warfare, — 
though the mother country should leave them, as 
she did, to contend single-handed with Indians, 
French, and an unpropitious soil and sky, — though 
acts of navigation and boards of trade should restrain 
their enterprise and rob it of its rewards, — that their 
triumph was still certain, and a later generation would 
partake of its fruits and be encompassed about by its 
glor3^ A thousand instructive particulars would 
be collected by such an antiquarian as the author 
of Old Mortality, serving to illustrate the employ- 
ments, customs, and character of this portion of our 
ancestors, and embodied in such a form as to become 
permanently a part of the current knoAvledge of an 
educated people. The industry of New England in 
1675 had taken almost all the great leading direc- 
tions in which it afterwards exerted itself with such 
splendid success. There were then nearly five hun- 
dred fishing vessels, large and small, in the four 



20 IMPORTANCE OF ILLUSTRATING 

colonies. The export of fish to the north of Spain, 
to Fayal and Madeira, and of lumber, pipe-staves, 
provisions, naval stores, and neat cattle, to the West 
Indies, and the import of wines and West India 
goods employed from one to two hundred vessels 
more, of a larger rate, built and owned in New Eng- 
land. The principal import of British goods was 
to Boston, whence they were shipped coastwise to 
Maine, Hartford, and New Haven. Linen, woollen, 
and cotton cloth, glass, and salt, to some extent, were 
manufactured in Massachusetts. The flax was all 
raised here ; the wool chiefly ; the cotton was im- 
ported. The equality of fortunes was remarkable 
even for that age of simple habits, and general indus- 
try and morality. There were only fifteen or twenty 
merchants worth five hundred pounds each ; and 
there were no beggars. The most showy mansion 
contained no more than twenty rooms ; but the 
meanest cottage had at least two stories, — a remark- 
able improvement since 1629, when the house of 
the Lady Moody, a person of great consideration in 
Salem, is said to have been only nine feet high, with 
a wooden chimney in the centre. Governor Winthrop 
says in his Journal, that he spent in the years he 
was governor five hundred pounds per annum, of 
which two hundred pounds — not seven hundred 
dollars — would have maintained him in a private 
condition. There were no musicians by trade ; a 
dancing-school was attempted, but failed. But a 
fencing-school in Boston succeeded eminently; we 
all know that fencing, without foils or tuition-fees, 
was the daily and nightly exercise of the youth and 
manhood of the colonies for half the first century of 



NEW ENGLAND HISTORY. 21 

their existence. It is strikingly characteristic of our 
fathers of that day of labor, temperate habits, and 
austere general morality, that a synod convened in 
1679 to inquu'e what crying sin of practice or opinion 
had brought down the judgment of God on the colo- 
nies ascribed it very much to the intemperate and 
luxurious habits of what they deemed a backsliding 
and downward age. Hubbard reckons among the 
moral causes of that war the pride, intemperance, 
and worldly-mindedness of the people ; and another 
writer of that day denounces with most lachrymose 
eloquence the increasing importations of wine, threat- 
ening the Ararat of the Pilgrims with a new kind of 
deluge. 

This last writer reminds us of a story which John 
Wilkes, I think, tells in Boswell's Johnson, that he 
once attended a Sunday meeting in the interior of 
Scotland when the preacher declaimed most furiously, 
for an hour, against luxury, although, said Wilkes, 
there were not three pairs of shoes in the whole 
congregation ! 

There are two or three subjects, among a thousand 
others of a different character, connected with the 
history of New England in that era, which deserve, 
and would reward, the fullest illustration which 
learning and genius and philosophy could bestow. 
They have been treated copiously and ably ; but I 
am sure that whoso creates the romantic literature of 
the country will be found to have placed them in new 
lights, and to have made them for the first time famil- 
iar, intelligible, and interesting to the mass of the 
reading community. 

Let me instance as one of these the old Puritan 



22 IMPORTANCE OF ILLUSTRATING 

character. In every view of it, it was an extraordi- 
nary mental and moral phenomenon. The countless 
influences which have been acting on man ever since 
his creation, — the countless variety of condition and 
circumstances, of climate, of government, of religion, 
and of social systems in which he has lived, never 
produced such a specimen of character as this before, 
and never will do so again. It was developed, dis- 
ciplined, and perfected for a particular day and a par- 
ticular duty. When that day was ended and that 
duty done, it was dissolved again into its elements, 
and disappeared among the common forms of human- 
ity, apart from which it had acted and suffered, — 
above which it had towered, yet out of which it had 
been by a long process elaborated. Tlie human in- 
fluences which combined to form the Puritan charac- 
ter from the general mind of England, — which set 
this sect apart from all the rest of the community, 
and stamped upon it a system of manners, a style of 
dress and salutation and phraseology, a distinct, entire 
scheme of opinions upon religion, government, mo- 
rality, and human life, marking it off from the crowds 
about it, as the fabled waters of the classical fountain 
passed underneath the sea, unmingied, unchanged in 
taste or color, — these things are matters of popular 
history, and I need not enumerate or weigh them. 
What was the final end for which the Puritans were 
raised up, we also in some part all know. All things 
here in New England proclaim it. The works which 
they did, these testify of them and of the objects and 
reality of their mission, and they are inscribed upon 
all the sides of our religious, political, and literary 
edifices, legibly and imperishably. 



NEW ENGLAND HISTOEY. 23 

But while we appreciate what the Puritans have 
done, and recognize the divine wisdom and purposes 
in raising them up to do it, something is wanting yet 
to give to their character and fortunes a warm, quick 
interest, a charm for the feelings and imagination, an 
abiding-place in the heart and memory and affections 
of all the generations of the people to whom they 
bequeathed these representative governments and this 
undefiled religion. It is time that literature and the 
arts should at least cooperate with history. Themes 
more inspiring or more instructive were never sung 
by old or modern bards in hall or bower. The whole 
history of the Puritans, — of that portion which 
remained in England and plucked Charles from his 
throne and buried crown and mitre beneath the foun- 
dations of the Commonwealth, and of that other not 
less noble portion which came out hither from Eng- 
land, and founded a freer, fairer, and more enduring 
Commonwealth — all the leading traits of their re- 
ligious, intellectual, and active character, their theo- 
logical doctrines, their superstitions, their notions of 
the divine government and economy, and of the place 
they filled in it, — every thing about them, every thing 
which befell them, — was out of the ordinary course 
of life ; and he who would adequately record their 
fortunes, display their peculiarities, and decide upon 
their pretensions, must, like the writer of the Penta- 
teuch, put in requisition alternately music, poetry, 
eloquence, and history, and speak by turns to the 
senses, the fancy, and the reason of the world. 

They were persecuted for embracing a purer Protes- 
tantism than the Episcopacy of England in the age 
of Elizabeth. Instead of ceasing to be Protestants, 



24 IMPORTANCE OF ILLUSTRATING 

persecution made them republicans, also. They were 
nicknamed Puritans by their enemies ; then after- 
ward they became a distinct, solitary caste, — among, 
but not of, the people of England. They were 
flattered, they were tempted, they were shut up in 
prison, they were baptized with the fire of martyr- 
dom. Soliicitation, violence, were alike unavailing, 
except to consolidate their energies, perfect their 
virtues, and mortify their human affections, — to raise 
their thoughts from the kingdoms and kings of this 
world, and the glory of them, to the contemplation of 
that surpassing glory which is to be revealed. Some 
of them at length, not so much because these many 
years of persecution had wearied or disheartened 
them, as because they saw in it an intimation of the 
will of God, sought the freedom which there they 
found not, on the bleak sea-shore and beneath the 
dark pine-forest of New England. History, fiction, 
literature, does not record an incident of such moral 
sublimity as this. Others, like Jineas, have fled 
from the city of their fathers after the victor has 
entered and fired it. But the country they left was 
peaceful, cultivated, tasteful, merry England. The 
asylum they sought was upon the very outside of 
the world. Others have traversed seas as wide, for 
fame or gold. Not so the Puritans. 

"Nor lure of conquest's meteor beam, 
Nor dazzling mines of fancy's dream, 
Nor wild adventure's love to roam, 
Brought from their fathers' ancient home, 
O'er the wide sea, the Pilgrim host." 

It was fit that the founders of our race should have 
been such men, — that they should have so labored 



NEW ENGLAND HISTORY. 25 

and so suffered, — that their tried and strenuous 
virtues should stand out in such prominence and 
grandeur. It will be well for us when their story 
shall have grown "familiar as a household word," 
when it shall make even your children's bosoms glow 
and their eyes glisten in the ballad and nursery -tale, 
and give pathos and elevation to our whole higher 
national minstrelsy. 

There is another subject connected with our early 
history eminently adapted to the nature and purposes 
of romantic literature, and worthy to be illustrated 
by such a literature, — that is, the condition, pros- 
pects, and fate of the New England tribes of Indians 
at the epoch of Philip's War. It has sometimes been 
remarked as a matter of reproach to a community, 
that it has suffered its benefactors to perish of want, 
and then erected statues to their memory. The 
crime does not lie in erecting the statue, but in hav- 
ing suffered the departed good and great, Avhom it 
commemorates, to perish. It has been our lot in the 
appointments of Providence to be, innocently or 
criminally, instruments in sweeping from the earth 
one of the primitive families of man. We build our 
houses upon their graves ; our cattle feed upon the 
hills from which they cast their last look upon the 
land, pleasant to them as it is now iDleasant to us, in 
which through an immemorial antiquity their gener- 
ations had been dwelling. The least we can do for 
them, for science and letters, is to preserve their his- 
tory. This we have done. We have explored their 
antiquities, studied and written their language and 
deduced its grammar, recorded their traditions, traced 
their wanderings, and embodied in one form or an- 



26 IMPORTANCE OF ILLUSTRATING 

other their customs, their employments, their super- 
stitions, and their religious belief. But there is in 
this connection one thing which, perhaps, poetry and 
romance can alone do, or can best do. It is to go back 
to the epoch of this war, for example, — paint vividly 
and affectingly the condition of the tribes which then 
wandered over, rather than occupied, the boundless 
wilderness extending from the margin of sea-coast 
covered by the colonists to the line of New York and 
Canada. The history of man, like the roll of the 
Prophet, is full, within and without, of mourning, 
lamentation, and woe ; but I do not know that in all 
that history there is a situation of such mournful 
interest as this. 

The terrible truth had at length flashed upon the 
Indian chief, that the presence of civilization, even 
of humane, peaceful, and moral civilization, was in- 
comj)atible with the existence of Indians. He com- 
prehended at length the tremendous power which 
knowledge, arts, law, government, confer upon social 
man. He looked in vain to the physical energies, 
the desperate, random, uncombined, and desultory 
exertions, the occasional individual virtues and abili- 
ties of barbarism, for an equal power to resist it. 
He saw the advancing poj)ulation of the Colonies. 
He saw ship-loads of white men day after day com- 
ing ashore from some land beyond the sea, of which 
he could only know that it Avas over-peopled. Every 
day the woodman's axe sounded nearer and nearer. 
Every day some valuable fishing or hunting-ground, 
or corn-land, or meadow, passed out of the Indian 
possession, and was locked up for ever in the mort- 
main grasp of an English title. What then, where 



NEW ENGLAND HISTORY. 27 

then, was the hope of the Indian ? Of the tribes far 
off to the East, — the once terrible Tarrateens, — 
they had no knowledge, but more dread than of the 
English themselves. The difficulty of communica- 
tion, the diversity of languages, the want of a press, 
the unsocial habits and policy of all nomadic races, 
made alliances with the Five Nations in New York — 
with any considerable tribe out of New England — 
impracticable. Civilization, too, was pushing its 
prow up the Hudson, even more adventurously than 
upon the Connecticut and Charles, the Merrimack, 
the Piscataqua, and the Kennebec. They were en- 
compassed about a» by the embrace of a serpent, 
contracting its folds closer at every turn and struggle 
of its victim, and leisurely choosing its own time to 
crush him to death. Such were the condition and 
prospects of the Indians of New England at the be- 
ginning of Philip's War. 

It is doubtful if that celebrated chief intended to 
provoke such a war, or if he ever anticipated for it a 
successful issue. But there is no doubt that after it 
had begun he threw his whole great powers into the 
conduct of it, — that he formed and moved a confed- 
eracy of almost all the aborigines of New Englasid 
to its support, — that he exhausted every resource of 
bravery and Indian soldiership and statesmanship, — 
that he died at last for a land and for a throne which 
he could not save. Our fathers called him King 
Philip, in jest. I would not wrong his warrior-sliade 
by comparing him with any five in six of the kings 
of Europe, of his day or ours ; and I sincerely wish 
that the elaborate jests and puns put forth by Hub- 
bard and Mather upon occasion of his death were 
erased from the records of New England. 



28 IiMPORTANCE OF ILLUSTRATING 

In the course of this decisive struggle with the 
Colonists, the Indians, some time when all human 
help seemed to fail, turned in anger and despair to 
the gods of their gloomy and peculiar w^orship. Be- 
neath the shades of the forest, which had stood from 
the creation, — at the entrance of caverns at mid- 
night, — in tempest and thunder, — they shed the 
human blood and uttered the incantations which 
their superstitions prescribed, and called up the 
spirits of evil to blast these daring strangers who 
neither feared, nor honored, nor recognized the an- 
cient divinities of the Indians. The spirits they had 
raised abandoned them. Their t)ffering was not ac- 
cepted, — their fires of sacrifice were put out. The 
long, dreary sigh of the night wind in the tops of 
the pines alone answered their misguided and erring 
prayers. Then they felt that their doom was sealed, 
and the cry — piercing, bitter, and final — of a per- 
ishing nation arose to heaven ! 

Let me solicit your attention to another view of 
this subject. I have urged thus far, that our future 
Waverley Novels and poetry would contain a good 
deal of positive information which our histories do 
not contain, — gleanings, if you please, of what the 
licensed reapers have, intentionally or unintention- 
ally, let fall from their hands ; and that this informa- 
tion would be authentic and valuable. I now add, 
that they would have another use. They w^ould 
make the information which our histories do contain 
more accessible and more engaging to the great body 
of readers, even if they made no addition to its abso- 
lute quantity. They would melt down, as it were, 
and stamp the heavy bullion into a convenient, uni- 



NEW ENGLAND HISTORY. 29 

versal circulating medium. They would impress the 
facts, the lessons of history, more deeply, and incor- 
porate them more intimately into the general mind 
and heart, and current and common knowledo-e of 
the people. 

All history, all records of the past, of the acts, 
opinions, and characters of those who have preceded 
us in the great procession of the generations, is full 
of instruction, and written for instruction. Espe- 
cially may we say so of our own history. But, of all 
which it teaches, its moral lessons are, perhaps, the 
most valuable. It holds up to our emulation and 
love great models of patriotism and virtue. It in- 
troduces us into the presence of venerated ancestors, 
" of whom the world was not worthy." It teaches 
us to appreciate and cherish this good land, these 
free forms of government, this pure worship of the 
conscience, these schools of popular learning, by re- 
minding us through how much tribulation, not our 
own, but others, these best gifts of God to man have 
been secured to us. It corrects the cold selfishness 
which would regard ourselves, our day, and our gen- 
eration, as a separate and insulated portion of man 
and time ; and, awakening our sympathies for those 
who have gone before, it makes us mindful, also, of 
those who are to follow, and thus binds us to our 
fathers and to our posterity by a lengthening and 
golden cord. It helps us to realize the serene and 
august presence and paramount claims of our coun- 
try, and swells the deep and full flood of American 
feeling. 

Such are some of the moral influences and uses of 
our history. Now, I say that he who writes the ro 



80 IMPORTANCE OF ILLUSTRATING 

mance of history, as Scott has written it, shall teac]i 
these lessons, and exert and diffuse these influences, 
even better than he who confines himself to what I 
may call the reality of history. In tlie first place, 
he could make a more select and discriminating 
choice of incidents and characters and periods of 
time. There is a story told of an epicure who never 
would eat more than one mouthful out of the sunny 
side of the peach. That is about the proportion, 
about the quality, of all which Scott culls out of 
history. 

Much of what history relates produces no impres- 
sion upon the moral sentiments or the imagination. 
Much of it rather chills, shames, and disgusts us, 
than otherwise. Throughout it is constantly excit- 
ing a succession of discordant and contradictory 
emotions, — alternate pride and mortification, alter- 
nate love and anger, alternate commendation and 
blame. The persecutions of the Quakers, the con- 
troversies with Roger Williams and Mrs. Hutchinson, 
the perpetual synods and ecclesiastical surveillance 
of the old times ; a great deal of this is too tedious 
to be read, or it offends and alienates you. It is 
truth, fact ; but it is just what you do not want to 
know, and are none the wiser for knowing. Now, 
he who Avrites the romance of history takes his choice 
of all its ample but incongruous material. " What- 
soever things are honest, whatsoever things are just, 
whatsoever things are pure, whatsoever things are 
lovely, whatsoever things are of good report, if there 
be any virtue and if there be any praise," — these 
things alone he thinks of and impresses. In this 
sense he accommodates the show of things to the 



NEW ENGLAND HISTORY. 31 

desires and the needs of the immortal, moral nature. 
To vary a figure of Milton's, instead of crowding his 
net, as Time crowds his, with all things precious and 
vile, — bright gems, sea- weed mixed with sand, bones 
of fishes, — he only dives for and brings up coral 
and pearl, and shells golden-valved and rainbow- 
colored, murmuring to the ear like an ^olian harp. 
He remembers that it is an heroic age to whose con- 
templation he would turn us back ; and as no man is 
a hero to his servant, so no age is heroic of which the 
whole truth is recorded. He records the useful truth 
therefore, only, — gathering only the wheat, wine, 
and oil into his garner, — leaving all the rest to 
putrefy or be burned. 

But farther. Such a writer as I am supposing is 
not only privileged to be more select and felicitous in 
his topics, his incidents, characters, and eras, but he 
treats these topics differently, and in a way to give 
ten thousand-fold more interest and impressiveness 
to all the moral lessons they are adapted to teach. 
He tells the truth, to be sure ; but he does not tell 
the whole truth, for that would be sometimes mis- 
placed and discordant. He tells something more 
than the truth, too, remembering that though man is 
not of imagination all comimct^ he is yet, in part, a 
creature of imagination, and can be reached and per- 
fected, by a law of his nature in part only through 
the imagination. He makes the imagination, there- 
fore, he makes art, wit, eloquence, philosophy, and 
poetry, invention, a skilful plot, a spirited dialogue, 
a happy play, balance and rivalry of characters, — 
he makes all these contribute to embellish and rec- 
ommend that essential, historical truth whicli is as 



32 IMPORTANCE OF ILLUSTRATING 

the nucleus of tlie whole fair orb. Thus he gives a 
vividness, individuality, nearness, magnitude, to the 
remotest past, which hardly belongs to the engross- 
ing and visible present, and which history gives to 
nothing. The Richard of Scott in his general char- 
acter and principal fortunes, in his chronology and 
geography, so to speak, is the Richard of history. 
But the reason you know him better is this : the par- 
ticular situations in which you see him in Ivanhoe 
and the Crusaders, the conversations he holds, his 
obstreperous contest of drink and music with the 
holy clerk in the cell, that more glorious contest with 
the traitors in the wood, with the Normans in the 
castle, the scene in his tent in which he was so nearly 
assassinated, and that in Saladin's tent where he 
challenged him in all love and honor to do mortal 
battle for the possession of Jerusalem, — these are 
all supplied by the imagination of the writer to the 
imagination of the reader. Probably they all hap- 
pened just as they are set forth ; but you can't ex- 
actly prove it out of any book of history. They are 
all probable ; they are exactly consistent with what 
we do know and can prove. But the record is lost 
by time and accident. They lie beyond the province 
of reason ; but faith and imagination stretch beyond 
that province, and complete the shadowy and imper- 
fect revelation. History shows you prospects by 
starlight, or at best by the waning moon. Romantic 
fiction, as Scott writes it, does not create a new 
heaven and a new earth ; but it just pours the 
brightness of noonday over the earth and sky. He 
shows you the same prospect which history does. 
But he shows it from a different point of view, and 



i 



NEW ENGLAND HISTORY. 33 

through a brighter, more lustrous medium, aucl by a 
more powerful oi)tical instrument. Some things 
which history would show, you do not see. But you 
see the best of every thing, — all that is grand and 
beautiful of Nature, all that is brilliant in achieve- 
ment, all that is magnanimous in virtue, all that is 
sublime in self-sacrifice ; and you see a great deal 
more of which history shows you nothing. To say 
that Scott's view of an age, a character, or a histori- 
cal event, is not a true view, is not much more sensi- 
ble than to say that nothing exists but what you can 
see in the dark, — tliat he who brings a light into 
your room in the night suddenly creates every thing 
which you are enabled to discover by the light of it. 
I do not know that I can better illustrate this dif- 
ference between the romance and the reality of his- 
tory, and in some respects the superiority of the 
former for teaching and impressing mere historical 
truth, than b}^ going back to the ten years which 
immediately preceded the Battle of Lexington. If 
idle wishes were not sinful as well as idle, that of all 
time past is the period in which we might all wish to 
have lived. Yet how meagre and unsatisfactory is 
the mere written history of that day. Indeed, there 
is hardly any thing there for history. The tea was 
thrown overboard, to be sure, and The Gaspd 
burned ; town meetings were held, and committees 
of correspondence chosen, and touching appeals, of 
pathos and argument and eloquence unequalled, 
addressed to the king and people of England in 
behalf of their oppressed subjects and brethren of 
America. And when history has told you this she 
is silent. You must go to Scott, or evoke the still 

3 






34 IMPORTANCE OF ILLUSTRATING 

mightier Shakspeare or Homer, if yoii would truly 
know what that day was, — what the people of that 
day were, — if you would share in that strong and 
wide excitement, see that feeling, not loud but deep, 
of anger and grief and conscious worth, and the 
sense of violated rights, in that mingled and luxu- 
rious emotion of hope and apprehension with which 
the heart of the whole country throbbed and labored 
as the heart of a man. And how would Scott reveal 
to you the spirit of that age ? He would place you 
in the middle of a group of citizens of Boston, going 
home from the Old South, perhaps, or Faneuil Hall, 
where James Otis, or Josiah Quincy, or Samuel 
Adams, had been speaking, and let you listen to 
their conversation. He would take you to their 
meeting on Sunday when the congregation stood up 
in prayer, and the venerable pastor adverted to the 
crisis, and asked for strength and guidance from 
above to meet it. He would remark to you that 
varied expression which ran instantaneously over the 
general countenance of the assembly, and show you 
in that varied expression — the varied fortunes of 
America — the short sorrow, the long joy, the strife, 
the triumph, the agony, and the glory. In that con- 
gregation you might see in one seat the worn frame 
of a mother whose husband followed the banners oi 
Wolfe, and fell with him on the Plains of Abraham, 
shuddering Avith apprehension lest such a life and 
such a death await her only son, yet striving as be- 
came a matron of New England, for grace to make 
even that sacrifice. You might see old men who 
dragged Sir William Pepperell's cannon along the 
beach at Louisburg, now only regretting that they 



NEW ENGLAND HISTORY. 35 

had not half so much youthful vigor left to fight 
their king as they then used up in fighting his ene- 
mies. You read in yonder eye of fire the energy 
and ardor of a statesman like John Adams, seeing 
clear through that day's business, and beholding the 
bright spot beyond the gloom. You see the blood 
mount into that cheek of manly beauty, betraying 
the youthful Warren's dream of fame I But as the 
pastor proceeded, and his feelings rose, and his voice 
swelled to its full expression, as he touched on the 
rights of the Colonies and the injustice of the king, — 
as his kindling imagination presented to him the 
scenes of coming and doubtful conflict, and he 
prayed that He to whom the shields of the earth 
belong would gird on his sword and go forth with 
our hosts on the day of battle, and would open their 
eyes to behold in every valley and in every plain, as 
the prophet beheld by the same illumination, chariots 
of fire and horses of fire, — you would see then all 
those minor shades of individual peculiarity pass 
away from the face of the assembly, and one uni- 
versal and sublime expression of religion and pa- 
triotism diffuse itself over all countenances alike, as 
sunshine upon a late disturbed sea. 

Thus somewhat would Scott contrive to give you 
a perception of that indefinable yet real and opera- 
tive existence, — the spirit of a strongly agitated 
age, — of the temper and determination of a people 
in a state of high excitement and fermentation, not 
yet broken out into overt conduct, — of that interval 
so full of strange interest, between the acting of 
a dreadful thing and the first motion. He does it 
simply and shortly by the power of philosophical 



36 IMPORTANCE OF ILLUSTRATING 

imagination working upon known facts, actual expe- 
rience, and the uniform laws of the human mind. 

In leaving this subject, I cannot help suggesting, 
at the hazard of being thought whimsical, that a 
literature of such writings as these, embodying the 
romance of the whole revolutionary and ante-revolu- 
tionary history of the United States, might do some- 
tM7ig to perpetuate the Union itself. The influence 
of a rich literature of passion and fancy upon society 
must not be denied merely because you cannot 
measure it by the j^ard or detect it by the barometer. 
Poems and romances which shall be read in every 
parlor, by every fireside, in every school-house, behind 
every counter, in every printing-office, in every law- 
yer's office, at every weekly evening club, in all the 
States of this Confederacy, must do something, along 
with more palpable if not more powerful agents, 
toward moulding and fixing that final, grand, com- 
plex result, — the national character. A keen, well- 
instructed judge of such things said, if he might ^\Tite 
the ballads of a people, he cared little who made its 
laws. Let me say, if a hundred men of genius would 
extract such a body of romantic literature from our 
early history as Scott has extracted from the history 
of England and Scotland, and as Homer extracted 
from that of Greece, it perhaps woidd not be so 
alarming if demagogues should preach, or governors 
practise, or executives tolerate nullification. Such 
a literature would be a common property of all the 
States, — a treasure of common ancestral recollec- 
tions, — more noble and richer than our thousand 
million acres of public land; and, unlike that land, 
it would be indivisible. It would be as the open- 



NEW ENGLAND HISTORY. S7 

ing of a great fountain for the healing of the 
nations. It would turn back our thoughts from these 
recent and overrated diversities of interest, — these 
controversies about negro-cloth, coarse-woolled sheep, 
and cotton bagging, — to the day when our fathers 
walked hand in hand together through the valley of 
the Shadow of Death in the War of Independence. 
Reminded of our fathers, we should remember that 
we are brethren. The exclusiveness of State pride, 
the narrow selfishness of a mere local policy, and the 
small jealousies of vulgar minds, would be merged 
in an expanded, comprehensive, constitutional senti- 
ment of old, family, fraternal regard. It would re- 
assemble, as it were, the people of America in one 
vast congregation. It would rehearse in their hear- 
ing all things which God had done for them in the 
old time ; it would proclaim the law once more ; and 
then it would bid them join in that grandest and 
most affecting solemnity, — a national anthem of 
thanksgiving for the deliverance, of honor for the 
dead, of proud prediction for the future ! 

It were good for us to remember that nothing 
which tends, however distantly, however impercepti- 
bly, to hold these States together, is beneath the 
notice of a considerate patriotism. It were good to 
remember that some of the institutions and devices 
by which former confederacies have been preserved, 
our circumstances wholly forbid us to employ. The 
tribes of Israel and Judah came up three times a 
year to the holy and beautiful city and united in 
prayer and praise and sacrifice, in listening to that 
thrilling poetry, in swelling that matchless song, 
which celebrated the triumphs of their fathers by the 



38 IMPORTANCE OF ILLUSTRATING 

Red Sea, at tlie fords of Jordan, and on the high 
places of the field of Barak's victory. But we have 
no feast of the Passover, or of the Tabernacles, or of 
the Commemoration. The States of Greece erected 
temples of the gods by a common contribution, and | 
worshipped in them. They consulted the same ora- 1 
cle ; they celebrated the same national festival ; min- 
gled their deliberations in the same Amphictyonic 
and subordinate assemblies, and sat together upon 
the same benches to hear their glorious history read 
aloud, in the prose of Herodotus, the poetry of 
Homer and of Pindar. We have built no national 
temples but the Capitol ; we consult no common 
oracle but the Constitution. We can meet together 
to celebrate no national festival. But the thousand 
tongues of the press — clearer far than the silver 
trumpet of the jubilee — louder than the voice of 
the herald at the games — may speak and do speak 
to the whole people, without calling them from their 
homes or interrupting them in their employments. 
Happy if they should speak, and the people should 
hear, those things which pertain at least to their 
temporal and national salvation ! 

It is painful to reflect that for whomsoever else is 
reserved this great achievement of beginning to 
create our national romantic literature, it is not for 
Sir Walter Scott. He died at his residence on the 
22d of September, and sleeps beneath the " pillared 
arches" of Dryburgh Abbey. In the introduction 
to that delightful poem, the " Lady of the Lake," he 
represents himself as taking down the long silent 
harp of the North from " the witch elm that shades 
St. Fillan's Spring," and reverently attempting to 



NEW ENGLAND HISTORY. 39 

wake it again to an echo of its earlier and nobler 
strains. That harp whose sway so many throbbing 
hearts have owned, is hung again on that tree for 
the night wind to breathe on, — " mouldering and 
muffled with envious ivy." Even now we may fancy 
its last tones falling on the ears of the Minstrel's 
contemporaries and survivors. 

" Receding now — its dying numbers ring 
Fainter and fainter down tlie rugged dell ; 
And now the mountain breezes scarcely bring 
A wandering witch-note of the distant spell ; 
And now — 'tis silent all — Enchantress, fare thee well I " 



40 THE COLONIAL AGE OF NEW ENGLAND. 



THE COLONIAL AGE OF NEW ENGLAND: 

AN ADDRESS DELIVERED AT THE CENTENNIAL CELEBRATION 
OF THE SETTLEMENT OF THE TOWN OF IPSWICH, MASS., 
AUGUST 16, 1834. 



I 



It is a fact which a native of this old, fertile, and 
beautiful town may learn with pleasure, but without 
surprise, that it was always the most fertile or among 
the most fertile and most beautiful portions of the 
coast of New England. John Smith, who in 1614 
explored that coast from Penobscot to Cape Cod, 
admires and praises " the many rising hills of Aga- 
wam," whose tops and descents are grown over with 
numerous corn-fields and delightful groves, the 
island to the east, with its " fair high woods of mul- 
berry trees," and the luxuriant growth of oaks, 
pines, and walnuts, "which make the place," he 
says, "an excellent habitation;" w^hile the Pilgrim 
Fathers in December, 1620, when deliberating on the 
choice of a spot for their settlement, some of them 
" urged greatly to Anguan or Angoan, a place twenty 
leagues off to the northward, which they heard to 
be an excellent harbor for ships, better ground, and 
better fishing." As early as January, 1632, the first 
governor of Massachusetts, John Winthrop, declared 
Agawam to be " the best place for tillage and cattle 
in the land;^^ others described its great meadows. 



THE COLONIAL AGE OF NEW ENGLAND. 41 

marshes, and plain ploughing grounds ; and that the 
government of the infant colony, Massachusetts, at 
the time resolved that it should be occupied forth- 
with by a sort of garrison, in advance and in antici- 
pation of its more formal and numerous settlement, 
for the express purpose of keeping so choice a spot 
out of the hands of the French. In March, 1G33, 
accordingly, there was sent hither a company of 
tlurteen men to acquire and to preserve, rather for 
the future than the present uses of the Colony, as 
much as they might of that fair variety of hill, plain, 
wood, meadow, marsh, and seashore, whose fame had 
spread so widely. The leader of the little band was 
John Winthrop, the son of the Governor. They 
arrived in that month — the dreariest of the New 
England year — on the banks of the river which 
washes in his sweet and cheerful course the foot of 
the hill on which we are assembled. They proceeded 
to purchase of Masconomo, the Sagamore of Agawam, 
by a deed to him, Winthro23, a portion of the terri- 
tory which composes the present corporation of 
Ipswich ; and there remained without, I imagine, 
any considerable addition to their number, without 
any regularly organized church, or stated preaching, 
or municipal character, until May, 1634. At that 
time the Rev. Thomas Parker, the pupil of the 
learned Archbishop Usher of Dublin, and about one 
hundred more, men, women, and children, came over 
from " the Bay " and took up their abode on the 
spot thus made ready for them. In August, 1634, 
the first church was organized ; and on this day two 
hundred years ago the town was incor2:)orated. With 
that deep filial love of England and the English, 



42 THE COLONIAL AGE OF NEW ENGLAND. 

which neither persecution, nor exile, nor distance, 
nor the choice of another and dearer home, nor the 
contemplation of the rapidly revealing and proud 
destinies of the New World, ever entirely plucked 
from the hearts of all the Colonists down to the war 
of Independence, they took the name of Ipswich 
from the Ipswich of the east coast of England, the I 
capital of the county of Suffolk, and the birthplace 
of Cardinal Wolsey. i 

And thus and by these was begun the civil and 
ecclesiastical establishment and history of Ipswich. 
You have done well in this way to commemorate an 
event of so much interest to you. It is well thus 
filially, thus piously, to wipe away the dust, if you 
may, which two hundred years have gathered upon 
the tombs of the fathers. It is well that you have 
gathered yourselves together on this height ; that as 
you stand here and look abroad upon as various and 
inspiring a view as the sun shines upon ; as you 
see fields of grain bending before the light summer 
wind, — one harvest just now ready for the sickle, 
and another and a richer preparing ; as you see your 
own flocks upon the tops and descents of the many 
rising hills ; mowing-lands shaven by the scythe ; 
the slow river whiding between still meadows, 
ministering in his way to the processes of nature 
and of art, — losing himself at last under your eye 
in the sea, as life, busy or quiet, glides into immor- 
tality ; as you hear peace and plenty proclaiming 
with a thousand voices the reign of freedom, law, 
order, morality, and religion ; as you look upon these 
charities of God, these schools of useful learning and 
graceful accomplishment, these great workshops of 



THE COLONIAL AGE OF NEW ENGLAND. 43 

yoiu- manufacturers, in which are witnessed — per- 
formed every day — achievements of art and science 
to which the whole genius of the ancient world pre- 
sents nothing equal ; as you dwell on all this various, 
touching, inspiring picture in miniature of a busy, 
prosperous, free, happy, thrice and four times happy, 
and blessed people, — it is well that standing here 
you should look backwards as well as around you 
and forward, — that you should call to mind, to 
whom under God you owe all these things ; whose 
weakness has grown into this strength; whose sor- 
rows have brought this exceeding great joy ; whose 
tears and blood, as they scattered the seed of that 
cold, late, ungenial, and uncertain spring, have fer- 
tiUzed this natural and moral harvest which is rolled 
out at your feet as one unbounded flood. 

The more particular history of Ipswich from its 
settlement to this day, and of the towns of Hamilton 
and Essex, — shoots successively from the parent 
stock, — has been written so minutely and with such 
general accuracy, by a learned clergyman of this 
county, that I may be spared the repetition of details 
with which he has made you familiar. This occasion, 
too, I think, prescribes topics somewhat more general. 
That long line of learned ministers, upright magis- 
trates, and valiant men of whom we are justly proud 
— our municipal fathers — were something more and 
other than the mere founders of Ipswich ; and we 
must remember their entire character and all their 
relations to their own times and to ours, or we cannot 
do them adequate honor. It is a boast of our local 
annals that they do not flow in a separate and soli- 
tary stream, but blend themselves with that broader 



11 



44 THE COLONIAL AGE OF NEW ENGLAND. 

and deeper current of events, the universal ante- 
revolutionary history of North America. It is the 
foundation of an empire, and not merely the purchase 
and plantation of Agawam, which we commemorate, 

— whether we will or not ; and I do not fear that 
we shall enlarge our contemplations too far, or ele- 
vate them too high, for the service to which we have 
devoted this day. 

The history of the Colonies w^hich were planted 
one after another along our coast in the seventeenth 
century, and which grew up in the fulness of time 
into thirteen and at last into twenty-four States, 
from their respective beginnings to the war of Inde- 
pendence, is full of interest and instruction, for what- 
ever purpose or in whatever way you choose to read 
it. But there is one point of view in which, if you 
will look at the events which furnished the matter 
of that colonial history, I think you will agree with 
me that they assume a character of peculiar interest, • 
and entitle themselves to distinct and profound con- 
sideration. I regard those events altogether as form- 
ing a vast and various series of influences, — a long, 
austere, effective coui-se of discipline and instruction, 

— by wdiich the settlers and their children were 
slowly and painfully trained to achieve their inde- 
pendence, to form their constitutions of State gov- 
ernments and of federal government, and to act 
usefully and greatly their part as a separate political 
community on the high places of the world. 

The Colonial period, as I regard it, was the 
charmed, eventful infancy and j^outh of our national 
life. The revolutionary and constitutional age, from 
1775 to 1789, was the beginning of its manhood. 



THE COLONIAL AGE OF NEW ENGLAND. 45 

The Declaration of Independence, the succeeding 
conduct of the war of Independence, the establish- 
ment of our local and general governments, and the 
splendid national career since run, — these are only 
effects, fruits, outward manifestations ! The seed 
was sown, the salient living spring of great action 
sunk deep in that long, remote, less brilliant, less 
regarded season, — the heroic age of America that 
preceded. The Revolution was the meeting of the 
rivers at the mountain. You may look there, to see 
them rend it asunder, tear it down from its summit 
to its base, and pass off to the sea. 

But the Colonial period is the country above, 
where the rivers were created. You must explore 
that region if you would find the secret fountains 
where they began their course, the contributory 
streams by which they grew, the high lands covered 
with woods, which, attracting the vapors as they 
floated about them, poured down rain and melted 
snow to swell their currents, and helped onward the 
momentum by which they broke through the walls 
of nature and shook the earth itself to its centre ! 
One of our most accomplished scholars and distin- 
guished public men speaks somewhere of the '' Mir- 
acle of the Revolution." I would say rather tliat 
the true miracle was the character of the people who 
made the Revolution ; and I have thought that an 
attempt to unfold some of the great traits of that 
character, and to point out the manner in which tlie 
events of the preceding Colonial Age contributed to 
form and impress those traits, imperfect as it must 
be, would be entirely applicable to this occasion. 



46 THE COLONIAL AGE OF NEW ENGLAND. 

The leading feature, then^ in the character of the 
American people in the age of the Revolution was 
what Burke called in Parliament their " fierce spirit i 
of libert}' -" " It is stronger in them," said he, " than 
in any other people on the earth." "I am con- 
vinced," said our j^outhful and glorious Warren, — 
in a letter to Quincy, little more than six months 
before he fell on the heights of Charlestown, — " I am 
convinced that the true spirit of liberty was never so 
universally diffused through all ranks and orders of 
men on the face of the earth, as it now is through all 
North America. It is the united voice of America 
to preserve their freedom or lose their lives in 
defence of it." Whoever overlooks, whoever un- 
derestimates this trait in the character of that gen- 
eration of our fathers, — whoever has not carefully 
followed it upwards to its remote and deep springs, 
may wonder at, but never can comprehend, the 
'^ Miracle of the Revolution." Whence, then, did 
they derive it? Let us return to the history of the 
Colonists before they came, and after they came, for 
the answer ; and for distinctness and brevity let us 
confine ourselves to the Northern Colonists, our im- 
mediate ancestors. 

The people of New England, at the beginning of 
the Revolutionary War, to describe them in a word, 
were the Puritans of Old England as they existed in 
that country in the first half of the seventeenth cen- 
tury ; but changed — somewdiat improved, let me 
say — by the various influences which acted upon 
them here for a hundred and fifty years after they 
came over. 

The original stock was the Puritan character of 



I 



THE COLONIAL AGE OF NEW ENGLAND. 47 

the age of Elizabeth, of James I., and of Charles I. 
It was transplanted to another soil ; another sun 
shone on it ; other winds fanned and shook it ; the 
seasons of another heaven for a century and a half 
circled round it ; and there it stood at length, the 
joint product of the old and the new, deep-rooted, 
healthful, its trunk massive, compact, and of rough 
and gnarled exterior, but bearing to the sky the 
glory of the wood. 

Turn first now, for a moment, to the Old English 
Puritans, the fathers of our fathers, of whom came, 
of whom were, planters of Ipswich, of Massachu- 
setts, of New England, — of whom came, of whom 
were, our own Ward, Parker, and Saltonstall, and 
Wise, Norton, and Rogers, and Appleton, and Cob- 
bet, and Winthrop, — and see whether they were 
likely to be the founders of a race of freemen or 
slaves. Remember, then, the true, noblest, the least 
questioned, least questionable, praise of these men 
is this : that for a hundred years they were the sole 
depositaries of the sacred fire of hberty in England, 
after it had gone out in every other bosom, — that 
they saved at its last gasp the English constitution, 
which the Tudors and the first two Stuarts were rap- 
idly changing into just such a gloomy despotism as 
they saw in France and Spain, and wrought into it 
every particle of freedom which it now possesses, — 
that when they first took their seats in the House of 
Commons, in the early part of the reign of Eliza- 
beth, they found it the cringing and ready tool of 
the throne, and that they reanimated it, remodelled 
it, reasserted its privileges, restored it to its constitu- 
tional rank, drew back to it the old power of making 



48 THE COLONIAL AGE OF NEW ENGLAND. 

laws, redressing wrongs, and imposing taxes, and 
thus again rebuilt and opened what an Englishman 
called '' the chosen temple of liberty," an English i 
House of Commons, — that they abridged the tre- 
mendous power of the crown and defined it, — and 
when at last Charles Stuart resorted to arms to re- , 
store the despotism they had partially overthrown, 1 
tliat they met him on a hundred fields of battle, and 
buried, after a sharp and long struggle, crown and 
mitre and the headless trunk of the kine himself 
beneath the foundations of a civil and religious com- 
monwealth. This praise all the historians of Eng- 
land — Whig and Tory, Protestant and Catholic, 
Hume, Hallam, Lingard, and all — award to the 
Puritans. By what causes this spirit of liberty had 
been breathed into the masculine, enthusiastic, aus- 
tere, resolute character of this extraordinary body of 
men, in such intensity as to mark them off from all 
the rest of the people of England, I cannot here and 
now particularly consider. It is a thrilling and 
awful history of the Puritans in England, from their 
first emerging above the general level of Protestants, 
in the time of Henry VHI. and Edward VI., until 
they were driven by hundreds and thousands to 
these sliores ; but I must pass it over. It was just 
when the nobler and grander traits — the enthusiasm 
and piety and hardihood and energy — of Puritanism 
had attained the highest point of exaltation to which, 
in England, it ever mounted up, and the love of lib- 
erty had grown to be the great master-passion that 
fired and guided all the rest, — it was just then that 
our portion of its disciples, filled with the undiluted 
spirit, glowing Avith the intensest fervors of Protes- 



THE COLONIAL AGE OF NEW ENGLAND. 49 

tantism and republicanism together, came hither, and 
in that elevated and holy and resolved frame began 
to build the civil and religious structures which you 
see around you. 

Trace, now, their story a little farther onward 
through the Colonial period to the War of Inde- 
pendence, to admire with me the providential ar- 
rangement of circumstances by which that spirit of 
liberty, which brought them hither, was strengthened 
and reinforced, until at length, instructed by wisdom, 
tempered by virtue, and influenced by injuries, by 
angler and g^rief and conscious worth and the sense of 
violated right, it burst forth, here and wrought the 
wonders of the Revolution. I have thought that if 
one had the power to place a youthful and forming 
people, like the northern colonists, in whom the love 
of freedom was already vehement and healthful, in 
a situation the most propitious for the growth and 
perfection of that sacred sentiment, he could hardly 
select a fairer field for so interesting an experiment 
than the actual condition of our fathers for the hun- 
dred and fifty years after their arrival, to the War of 
the Revolution. 

The}^ had freedom enough to teach them its value, 
and to refresh and elevate their spirits, wearied, not 
despondent, from the contentions and trials of Eng- 
land. They were just so far short of perfect free- 
dom, that, instead of reposing for a moment in the 
mere fruition of what they had, they Avere kept em- 
ulous and eager for more, looking all tlie while up 
and aspiring to rise to a loftier height, to breathe a 
purer air, and bask in a brighter beam. Compared 
with the condition of England down to 1688, — com- 



50 TPIE COLONIAL AGE OF NEW ENGLAND. 

pared with that of the larger part of the continent 
of Europe down to our Revolution, — theirs was a 
privileged and liberal condition. The necessaries of 
freedom, if I may say so, — its plainer food and 
homelier garments and humbler habitations, — were 
theirs. Its luxuries and refinements, its festivals, its 
lettered and social glory, its loftier port and prouder 
look and richer graces, were the growth of a later 
day; these came in with independence. Here was 
liberty enough to make them love it for itself, and 
to fill them with those lofty and kindred sentiments 
which are at once its fruit and its nutriment and 
safeguard in the soul of man. But their liberty was 
still incomplete, and it was constantly in danger from 
England ; and these two circumstances had a power- 
ful effect in increasing that love and confirming those 
sentiments. It was a condition precisely adapted to 
keep liberty, as a subject of thought and feeling and 
desire, every moment in mind. Every moment 
they were comparing what they had possessed 
with what they wanted and had a right to; they 
calculated by the rule of three, if a fractional part 
of freedom came to so much, what would express 
the power and value of the whole number I They 
were restive and impatient and ill at ease ; a 
galling wakefulness possessed their faculties like a 
spell. Had they been Avholly slaves, they had lain 
still and slept. Had they been wholly free, thati 
eager hope, that fond desire, that longing after: 
a great, distant, yet practicable good, would have 
given way to the placidity and luxury and careless- 
ness of complete enjoyment; and that energy and| 
wholesome agitation of mind would have gone down 



i 



THE COLONIAL AGE OF NEW ENGLAND. 51 

like an ebb-tide. As it was, the whole vast body of 
waters all over its surface, down to its sunless, ut- 
most depths, was heaved and shaken and purified by 
a spirit that moved above it and through it, and gave 
it no rest, though the moon weaned and the winds 
were in their caves ; they were like the disciples of 
the old and bitter philosophy of Paganism, who had 
been initiated into one stage of the greater mysteries, 
and who had come to the door, closed, and written 
over with strange characters, which led up to an- 
other. They had tasted of truth, and they burned 
i for a fuller draught ; a partial revelation of that 
which shall be hereafter had dawned ; and their 
hearts throbbed eager, yet not without apprehension, 
to look upon the glories of the j)erfect day. Some 
of the mj'stery of God, of Nature, of Man, of the 
Universe, had been unfolded ; might they, by prayer, 
by abstinence, by virtue, by retirement, by contem- 
plation, entitle themselves to read another page in 
the clasped and awful volume? 

Sparing and inadequate as their supply of liberty 
was, it was all the wdiile in danger from the Crown 
and Parliament of England, and the whole ante- 
revolutionary period was one unintermitted struggle 
to preserve it, and to wrest it away. You sometimes 
hear the Stamp Act spoken of as the first invasion of 
the rights of the colonists by the mother country. 
In truth, it was about the last ; the most flagrant, 
perhaps, the most dreadful and startling to an Eng- 
lishman's idea of liberty, but not the first, — no, by 
a hundred and fifty years not the first. From the 
day that the Pilgrims on board The Mayflower at 
Plymouth, before they landed, drew up that simple, 



62 THE COJ.ONIAL AGE OF NEW ENGLAND. 

but pregnant and comprehensive, form of democracy, 
and subscribed their names, and came out a colony 
of republicans, to the battle of Lexington, there 
were not ten years together, — I hardly exempt the 
Protectorate of Cromwell, — in which some right — 
some great and sacred right, as the colonists regarded 
it — was not assailed or menaced by the government 
of England, in one form or another. From the first, 
the mother country complained that we had brought 
from England, or had found here, too much liberty^ — 
liberty inconsistent with prerogatives of the Crown, 
inconsistent with supremacy of Parliament, incon- 
sistent with the immemorial relations of all colonies 
to the country they sprang from, — and she set her- 
self to abridge it. We answered with great submis- 
sion that we did not honestly think that we had 
brought or had found much more than half liberty 
enough ; and we braced ourselves to keep what we 
had, and obtain more when we could ; — and so, 
with one kind of weapon or another, on one field 
or another, on one class of questions or another, a 
struggle was kept up from the landing at Plymouth 
to the surrender at York-town. It was all one single 
struggle from beginning to end ; the parties, the ob- 
jects, the principles, are the same ; — one sharp, long, 
glorious, triumphant struggle for liberty. The topics, 
the heads of dispute, various from reign to reign ; 
but, tliough the subjects were various, the question 
was one^ — shall the colonists be free, or shall they be 
slaves ? 

And that question was pronounced by everybody, 
understood by everybody, debated by everybody, — 
in the colonial assemblies ; by the clergy on the days 



THE COLONIAL AGE OF NEW ENGLAND. 53 

of thanksgiving, on fast-days, and quarterly fast- 
days ; and by the agents of the colonies in England ; 
and at last, and more and more, through the press. 
I say nothing here of the effect of such a contro- 
versy so long continued, in sharpening the faculties 
of the colonists, in making them acute, prompt, in- 
genious, full of resource, familiar with the grounds 
of their liberties, their history, revolutions, extent, 
nature, and the best methods of defending them 
argumentatively. These were important effects ; but 
I rather choose to ask you to consider how the love of 
liberty would be inflamed ; how ardent, jealous, irre- 
sistible it would be made ; with what new and what 
exaggerated value even, it Avould learn to invest its 
object, by being thus obliged to struggle so unceas- 
ingly to preserve it ; and by coming so many times 
so near to lose it ; and by being thus obliged to bear 
it away like another Palladium, at the hazard of 
blindness, from the flames of its temple which would 
have consumed it, — across seas gaping wide to 
swallow it up, — through serried ranks of armed 
men who had marked it for a prey. 

There was one time during this long contest when 
it might have seemed to any race of men less resolved 
than our fathers, that liberty had at last returned 
from earth to the heavens from which she descended. 
A few years before 1688 — the year of the glorious 
revolution in England — the British king succeeded, 
after a struggle of more than half a century, in 
wresting from Massachusetts her first charter. From 
that time, or rather from December, 1685, to April, 
1689, the government of all New England was an 
undisguised and intolerable despotism. A governor, 



64 THE COLONIAL AGE OF NEW ENGLAND. 

Sir Edmund Andros, — not chosen by the people as 
every former governor had been, but appointed by 
James II., — worthy to serve such a master, — and a 
few members, less than the majority, of the council, 
also appointed by the king, and very fit to advise 
such a governor, grasped and held the whole civil 
power. And they exercised it in the very spirit of 
the worst of the Stuarts. The old, known body of 
colonial laws and customs which had been adopted 
by the people, was silently and totally abolished. 
New laws were made ; taxes assessed ; an administra- 
tion all new and all vexatious was introduced, not by 
the people in general court, but by the governor and 
a small, low faction of his council, in whose election 
they had no vote ; over whose proceedings they had 
no control ; to whom their rights and interests and 
lives were all as nothing compared with the lightest 
wish of the Papist and tyrant James whom they 
served. A majority of the council, although ap- 
pointed by the king, wore yet true hearts of New 
England in their bosoms, and resisted with all their 
might the tyranny which the government was rivet- 
ing upon her. One of these. Major Samuel Appleton, 
was an inhabitant of Ipswich, a son of one of the 
earliest settlers of the town, the ancestor of a long 
line of learned, energetic, and most respectable 
descendants. He had the high honor to be arrested 
in October, 1689, by Andros and his faction in the 
council, as being a factious member of the board and 
disaffected to the government, and was obliged to 
give bonds in the sum of £1000 to be of good po- 
litical behavior. But the efforts of this gentle- 
man, and of such as he in the council, could avail 



THE COLOXIAL AGE OF NEW ENGLAND. 55 

nothing; and the arbitrary tyranny of the creat- 
ures of the Stuarts became the only government of 
Massachusetts. 

In this the darkest day that New England ever 
saw, it is grateful to pause and commemorate an act 
of this town of Ipswich which deserves, I think, an 
honorable place in the universal history of liberty. 
Sir Edmund Andros and his faction had, without the 
intention of the colonial legislature, or any repre- 
sentatives of the people, made a decree imposing a 
State tax on the people, against that fundamental 
principle of liberty, that the people alone can tax 
themselves. , They had assessed in several towns 
quotas of it, and had commanded them to choose 
each a commissioner, who, with the boards of the 
selectmen, should assess the quota of the town on its 
inhabitants and estates respectively. A meeting of 
the inhabitants of Ipsmch was warned to be holden 
on the 23d August, 1687, to choose a commissioner to 
aid the selectmen in assessinsf the tax. The evenino- 
before the meeting the Rev. John Wise, the minister 
of the parish now Essex, a learned, able, resolute, and 
honest man, — worthy to preach to the children of 
Puritans, — Robert Kinsman, William Goodhue, Jr., 
and several other principal inhabitants of Ipswich, 
held a preparatory caucus at the house of John 
Appleton, brother of Major Samuel Appleton, which 
stood, or stands, on the road to Topsfield, and there 
" discoursed, and concluded that it was not the town's 
duty any ivay to assist that ill method of raising 
money without a general assembly.'' The next day 
they attended the town-meeting, and Mr. Wise made a 
speech, enforcing this opinion of liis friends, and said, 



56 THE COLONIAL AGE OF NEW ENGLAND. 

" We have a good Gocl, and a good king, and should 
do well to stand on our privileges." And by their 
privileges they concluded to stand. I cannot read 
the simple, manly, and noble vote of Ipswich on that 
day without a thrill of pride, — that then, when the 
hearts of the pious and brave cliildren in Massachu- 
setts seemed almost sunk within them, — our charter 
gone, James Stuart the Second on the throne, (I 
suspect it was irony or policy of Mr. Wise to call 
him a good king) — just when the long-cherished, 
long-dreaded design of the English Crown to reduce 
the colonies into immediate dependence on itself, and 
to give them, unconcealed, slavery for substantial free- 
dom, seemed about to be consummated, — that we 
here and then, with full knowledge of the power and 
temper of Andros and his council, dared to assert 
and to spread out upon our humble record the great 
principle of English liberty and of the American 
Kevolution. The record dechires " that considering 
the said act " (referring to the order of the governor 
and council imposing the tax) " doth infringe their 
liberty as free-horn English subjects of His JMajesty, 
and by interfering with the statute laws of the land 
by which it was enacted that no taxes should be 
levied upon the subjects without the consent of an 
assembly choseyi by the free men for assessing the 
same^ — they do, therefore, vote that they are not 
wilhng to clioose a commissioner for such an end 
without such a privilege ; — and they, moreover, con- 
sent not that tlie selectmen do proceed to levy any 
such rale, until it be appointed by a general assembly, 
concurring with the Governor and Council." 

For the share they had taken in the proceedings 



THE COLONIAL AGE OF NEW ENGLAND. 57 

of that memorable day, Mr. Wise and five others, 
probably those who met with him, and Mr. Appleton 
himself, were arrested, by order of the Governor, as 
for a contempt and misdemeanor, and carried beyond 
the limits of the county, imprisoned in jail at Boston, 
denied the writ of habeas corpus, tried by a packed 
jury — principally strangers and foreigners, I rejoice 
to read — and a subservient court, and of course 
found guilty. They were all fined more or less 
heavily, from X15 to £50, compelled to enter into 
bonds of from £500 to £1000 each to keep the peace, 
and Mr. Wise was suspended from the ministerial 
function, and the others disqualified to bear office. 

The whole expense of time and money to which 
they were subjected was estimated to exceed £400, — 
a sum equivalent to perhaps 85000 of our money, — 
enough to build the Ipswich part of Warner's Bridge 
more than three times over ; which the town shortly 
after nobly and justly, yet gratuitously, refunded to 
the sufferers. 

These men, says Pitkin, who is not remarkable for 
enthusiasm, may justly claim a distinguished rank 
among the patriots of America. You, their towns- 
men — their children — may well he proud of them ; 
prouder still, but more grateful than proud, that a 
full town-meeting of the freemen of Ipswich adopted 
unanimously that declaration of right, and refused to 
collect or pay the tax which would have made them 
slaves. The principle of that vote was precisely the 
same on which Hampden resisted an imposition of 
Charles I., and on which Samuel Adams and Hancock 
and Warren resisted the Stamp Act, — the principle 
that if any power but the people can tax the people, 
there is an end of liberty. 



58 THE COLONIAL AGE OF NEW ENGLAND. 

The later and more showy spectacles and brighter 
glories and visible results of the age of the Eevolu- 
tion liave elsewhere cast into the shade and almost 
covered with oblivion the actors on that interesting- 
day, and the act itself, — its hazards, its intrepidity, 
its merits, its singularity and consequences. But 
you will remember them, and teach them to your 
children. The graves of those plain, venerable, and 
sturdy men of the old, old time, who thus set their 
lives on the hazard of a die for the perishing liberties 
of Massachusetts ; the site of the house where they 
assembled — they, the fathers of the town — the day 
before the meeting, to consider what advice they 
should give to their children in that great crisis, so 
full of responsibility and danger ; the spot on which 
that building stood where the meeting was holden 
and the declaration recorded, — these are among 
you yet ; your honor, your treasure, the memorials 
and incentives of virtue and patriotism and courage, 
which feared God and knew no other fear ! Go 
sometimes to those graves, and give an hour of the 
summer evening to the brave and pious dead. Go 
there, and thank God for pouring out upon them the 
spirit of liberty, and humbly ask Him to transmit it, 
as it breathed in them, their children, and their chil- 
dren's cliildren, to the thousandth generation ! 

I have said part of what I intended of one trait 
in the character of our fathers of the revolutionary 
age, — their spirit of liberty. But something more 
than the love of libert}^ is needfid to fit a people for 
the enjoyment of it. Other men, other nations, have 
loved liberty as well as our fathers. The sentiment 
is innate, and it is indestructible, and immortal. 



THE COLONIAL AGE OF NEW ENGLAND. 59 

Yet of the wide-spread families of the earth, in the 
long procession of the generations, that stretches 
backward to the birth of the world, how few have 
been free at all ; how few have been long free ; how 
imperfect was their liberty while they possessed it ; 
how speedil}^ it flitted away ; how hard to woo it to 
return ! In all Asia and Africa — continents whose 
population is more than four sevenths of the human 
race on earth, whose history begins ages before a ray 
of the original civilization of the East had reached 
to Europe — there was never a free nation. And 
how has it been in Europe, that proud seat of power, 
art, civilization, enterprise, and mind? Alas for the 
destiny of social man ! Here and there in ancient 
and in later times, in Greece, in Rome, in Venice, in 
France, men have called on the Goddess of Liberty 
in a passionate and ignorant idolatry ; they have em- 
bodied her angelical brightness and unclouded seren- 
ity in marble ; they have performed dazzling actions, 
they have committed great crimes in her name ; they 
have built for her the altars where she best loves to 
be worshipped, — republican forms of government ; 
they have found energy, genius, the love of glory, 
the mad dream of power and pride in her inspiration. 
But they were not wise enough, they were not vir- 
tuous enough for diffused, steady, lasting freedom. 
Their heads were not strong^ enouo^h to bear a 
draught so stimulating. They perished of raging 
fever, kindled by drinking of the very waters of 
social life ! These stars one after another burned 
out, and fell from their throne on high ! 

England guarded by the sea ; Holland behind her 
dikes ; a dozen Swiss Cantons breathing the difficult 



60 THE COLONIAL AGE OF NEW ENGLAND. 

air of the iced mountain tops, — these, in spite of 
revolutions, all were free governments. And in the 
whole of the Old World there was not another. 
Tlie love of liberty there was ; but a government 
founded in liberty there was not one besides. Some 
things other than the love of freedom are needful to 
form a great and free nation. Let us go farther 
then, and observe the wisdom and prudence by 
which, after a long and painful process, our fathers 
were prepared, in mind and heart, for the permanent 
possession, tempered enjoyment, and true use of that 
freedom, the love of which was rooted in their souls ; 
the process by which, in the words of Milton, they 
were made into a '' right pious, right honest, right 
holy nation," as well as a nation loving liberty. In 
running over that process, I am inclined to attach 
the most importance to the fact that they who 
planted New England, and all the generations of 
successors, to the war of Independence, were engaged 
in a succession of the severest and gravest trials and 
labors and difficulties which ever tasked the spirit of 
a man or a nation. 

It has been said that there was never a great char- 
acter, — never a truly strong, masculine, command- 
iug character, — which was not made so by successive 
struggles with great difficulties. Such is the general 
rule of the moral world, undoubtedly. All history, 
all biography, verify and illustrate it, and none more 
remarkably than our own. 

It has seemed to me probable that if the Puritans, 
on their arrival here, had found a home like that 
they left, and a social system made ready for them, — 
if they had found the forest felled, roads constructed, 



THE COLONIAL AGE OF NEW ENGLAND. 61 

rivers bridged, fields sown, houses built, a rich soil, a 
bright sun, and a balmy air, — if they had come into 
a country which for a hundred and fifty years was 
never to hear the war-whoop of a savage, or the tap 
of a French drum, — if they had found a common- 
wealth civil and religious, a jurisprudence, a system 
of police, administration, and policy, all to their 
hands, churches scattered, districts, parishes, towns, 
and counties, widening one around the other, — if 
England had covered over their infancy witli her 
mighty wing, spared charters, widened trade, and 
knit child to mother by parental policy, — it is prob- 
able that that impulse of high mind, and that un- 
conquerable constancy of the first emigrants, might 
have subsided before the epoch of the drama of the 
Revolution. Their children might have grown light, 
luxurious, vain, and the sacred fire of liberty, cher- 
ished by the fathers in the times of the Tudors and 
Stuarts, might have died away in the hearts of a 
feeble posterity. 

Ours was a different destiny. I do not mean to 
say that the whole Colonial Age was a scene of uni- 
versal and constant suffering and labor, and that 
there was no repose ; of peril pressing at every turn, 
and every moment, on everybody. But in its gen- 
eral course it was a time of suffering and of priva- 
tion, of poverty or mediocrity of fortune, of sleepless 
nights, grave duties, serious aims ; and I say it was 
a trial better fitted to train up a nation '' in true 
wisdom, virtue, magnanimity, and the likeness of 
God," — better fitted to form temperate habits, strong 
character, resolute spirits, and all the radiant train 
of public and private virtues which stand before the 



1 



62 THE COLONIAL AGE OF NEW ENGLAND. 

stars of the throne of liberty, — than any smiilar 
period in the history of any nation, or of any but 
one, that ever existed. 

Some seasons there were of sufferings so sharp and 
strange, that they might seem designed to test the 
energy of Puritan principles. Such was the summer 
and winter after Governor Winthrop's arrival in New 
England, 1670-1671. Such the winter and spring 
after the arrival of the Puritans at Plymouth, 1620- 
1621. They wasted away — young and old of the 
little flock — of consumption and fever of lungs ; 
the living scarcely able to bury the dead ; the well 
not enough to tend the sick ; men who landed a few 
weeks before in full strength, their bones moistened 
with marrow, were seen to stagger and fall from 
faintness for want of food. In a country abounding 
in secret springs, they perished for want of a draught 
of good water. Childhood drooped and died away, 
like a field-flower turned up by the ploughshare. 
Old age was glad to gather himself to his last sleep. 
Some sank down, broken-hearted, by the graves of 
beloved wives and sons. Of the whole one hundred 
and one who landed at Plymouth, there were once 
only seven able to render assistance to the dying and 
the sick. 

A brilliant English writer, speaking of the Jews, 
exclaims, with surprise and indignation, that even a 
desert did not make them wise. Our fathers, let me 
say, not vaingloriously, were readier learned of wis- 
dom. Their sufterings chastened, purified, and ele- 
vated them ; and led them to repose their weary and 
stricken spirits upon the strength which upholds the 
world. Thus to be afflicted, thus to profit by afflic- 



THE COLONIAL AGE OF NEW ENGLAND. 63 

tion, is good for a nation as it is good for a man. 
To neither is it joyous, but grievous ; to both it is all 
made up over and over again by a more exceeding 
weight of glory. 

Look now, passing from the sufferings, to the 
gigantic labors of our Colonial Age, and calculate 
their influence on those who performed them. 

The first great work of the earlier generations of 
New England was to reclaim the country, to fit it 
for the sustentation of life from day to day, from 
season to season, and thus to become the abode of an 
intellectual and social civilization advancing indefi- 
nitely. This is the first great work of all nations, 
who begin their existence in a country not before the 
residence of cultivated man. The nature of this 
work, — the ease and difficulty of performing it de- 
pending of course on the great natural characteristics 
of the region, — its fertility, its even or uneven sur- 
face, the quality, as well as the abundance or scarcity 
of its products, the brightness and dryness, or gloom 
and moisture of its skies, its cold or hot temperature, 
and the like, — the nature of this first and severest 
of the herculean labors of nations, perhaps quite as 
much as any other cause, perhaps as much as all 
other causes, affects the moral and mental character 
and habits of the people which have it to do. It has 
been maintained, and with great ingenuity, that the 
whole subsequent career of a nation has taken 
impulse and direction from the circumstances of 
physical condition in which it came first into life. 
The children of the luxurious East opened their eyes 
on plains whose fertility a thousand harvests could 



G4 THE COLONIAL AGE OF NEW ENGLAND. 



li 



not exhaust, renewing itself perpetually from the 
bount}^ of a prodigal nature, beneath bright suiis, in i 
a warm, balmy air, w^hich floated around them like ' 
music and perfumes from revels on the banks of 
rivers by moonlight. " Every blast shook spices 
from tlie leaves, and every month dropped fruits | 
upon the ground." " The blessings of nature were 
collected, and its evils extracted and excluded." 
Hence the immemorial character of a part of the 
tribes of Asia. They became indolent, effeminate, ■ 
and timorous. Steeped in sensual enjoyments, the 
mind slept with the body ; or if it awoke, unlike 
the reasoning, speculative, curious, and energetic 
intellect of Europe, it reposed in reverie ; it diffused 
itself in long contemplation, musing rather than 
thinking, reading human destiny in the stars, but 
making no effort to comprehend the system of the 
world. Life itself there is but a fine dream ; and 
death is only a scattering of the garlands, a hush- 
ing of the music, a putting out of the lights of a mid- 
summer night's feast. You would not look there for 
freedom, for morality, for true religion, for serious 
reflections. 

The destiny of the most of Europe was different. 
Vast forests covering half a continent, rapid and 
broad rivers, cold winds, long winters, large tracts 
unsusceptible of cultivation, snow-clad mountains on 
whose tops the lightning plays impassive, — this was 
the world that fell to their lot. And hence partly, 
that race is active, laborious, curious, intellectual, 
full of energy, tending to freedom, destined to free- 
dom, but not yet all free. 

I cannot now pause to qualify this view, and make 



THE COLONIAL AGE OF NEW ENGLAND. 65 

the requisite discriminations between the different 
States of that quarter of the world. 

To the tempest-tossed and weather-beaten, yet 
sanguine and enthusiastic spirits who came hither, 
New Enghand hardly presented herself at first in all 
that ruggedness and sternest wildness which nature 
has impressed indelibly upon her. But a few sum- 
mers and winters revealed the whole truth. They 
had come to a country fresh from the hand of nature, 
almost as on the day of creation, covered with prime- 
val woods, which concealed a soil not very fruitful 
and bearing only the hardier and coarser grains and 
grasses, broken into rocky hills and mountains send- 
ing their gray summits to the skies, the upland 
levels, with here and there a strip of interval along 
a pleasant river, and a patch of salt-marsh by the 
side of the sea, — a country possessing and producing 
neither gold, nor diamonds, nor pearls, nor spices, 
nor opium, nor bread-fruit, nor silks, nor the true 
vine, — to a long and cold winter, an uncertain 
spring, a burning summer, and autumn with his 
fleecy clouds and bland south-west, red and yellow 
leaf and insidious disease ; — such was the ungenial 
heaven beneath which their lot was cast ; such was 
New England, yielding nothing to idleness, nothing 
to luxury, but yet holding out to faith and patience 
and labor, freedom and skill, and public and private 
virtue, — holding out to these the promise of a latter 
day afar off, of glory and honor and rational and 
sober enjoyment. Such was the country in which 
the rugged infancy of New England was raised. 
Such was the country which the Puritans were ap- 
pointed to transpose into a meet residence of refine- 

5 



(jQ THE COLONIAL AGE OF NEW ENGLAND. 

merit and liberty. You know how they performed 
that duty. Your fathers have told you. From this 
hill, westward and southward, and eastward and 
northward, your eyes may see how they performed 
it. The wilderness and the solitary place were glad 
for them, and the desert rejoiced and blossomed as 
the rose. The land was a desolate wilderness before 
them ; behind them, as the garden of Eden. How 
glorious a triumph of patience, energy, perseverance, 
intelligence, and faith ! And then how powerfully 
and in how many ways must the fatigues, privations, 
interruptions, and steady advance and ultimate com- 
pletion of that long day's work have reacted on the 
character and the mind of those who performed it ! 
How could such a people ever again, if ever they 
had been, be idle, or frivolous, or giddy, or luxurious ! 
With what a resistless accession of momentum must 
they turn to every new, manly, honest, and worthy 
labor ! How truly must they love the land for which 
they had done so much ! How ardently must they 
desire to see it covered over with the beauty of holi- 
ness and the glory of freedom as with a garment ! 
With what a just and manly self-approbation must 
they look back on such labors and such success ; and 
how great will such pride make any people ! 

There was another great work, different from this, 
and more difficult, more glorious, more improving, 
which they had to do, and that was to establish their 
system of colonial government, to frame their code 
of internal law, and to administer the vast and per- 
plexing political business of the colonies in their 
novel and trying relations to England, through the 
whole Colonial Age. Of all their labors this was the 



THE COLONIAL AGE OF NEW ENGLAND. 67 

grandest, the most intellectual, the best calculated 
to fit them for independence. Consider how much 
patient thought, how much observation of man and 
life, how much sagacity, how much communication 
of mind with mind, how many general councils, plots, 
and marshalling of affairs, how much slow accumula- 
tion, how much careful transmission of wisdom, that 
labor demanded. And what a school of civil capacity 
this must have proved to them who partook in it ! 
Hence, I think, the sober, rational, and practical 
views and conduct wdiich distinguished even the 
first fervid years of the Revolutionary^ age. How 
little giddiness, rant, and foolery do you see there ! 
No riotous and shouting processions, — no grand 
festivals of the goddess of reason, — no impious 
dream of human perfectibility, — no unloosing of the 
hoarded-up passions of ages from the restraints of 
law, order, morality, and religion, such as shamed 
and frightened away the new-born liberty of revolu- 
tionary France. Hence our victories of peace were 
more brilliant, more beneficial, than our victories of 
w^ar. Hence those fair, I hope everlasting, monu- 
ments of civil wisdom, our State and Federal Con- 
stitutions. Hence the coolness, the practised facility, 
the splendid success, with which they took up and 
held the wdiip and reins of the fiery chariot flying 
through the zodiac, after the first driver had been 
stricken by the thunder from his seat. 

Do you not think it was a merciful appointment 
that our fathers did not come to the possession of 
independence, and the more perfect freedom which 
it brought with it, as to a great prize drawn in a lot- 
tery, — an independent fortune left unexpectedly by 



68 THE COLONIAL AGE OF NEW ENGLAND. 

the death of a distant rehitive of whom they had 
never heard before, — a mine of gold opened just 
below the surface on the side of the hill by a flash 
of lightning? If they had, it would have turned 
their heads or corrupted their habits. They were 
rather in the condition of one of the husbandmen of 
old Ipswich, a little turned of one-and-twenty, who 
has just paid off the last legacy, or the last gage upon 
the estate left him by his father, — an estate where 
his childhood plaj'ed with brothers and sisters now 
resting in early graves, in which the first little labors 
of his young hands were done, from which he can 
see the meeting-house spire above the old interven- 
ing elms, to which his own toil, mingled with that of 
his ancestors of many generations, has given all its 
value, which, before he had owned, he had learned 
how to keep, how to till, how to transmit to his heirs 
enlarged and enriched with a more scientific and 
tasteful cultivation. 

I can only allude to one other labor, one other 
trial of the Colonial Age, — the wars in which for 
one lumdred and fifty years our fathers were every 
moment engaged, or to which they were every mo- 
ment exposed, and leave you to estimate the influ- 
ence which these must have had on the mind and 
character, and at last on the grand destinies of New 
England and of North America. 

It is dreadful that nations must learn war; but 
since they must, it is a mercy to be taught it season- 
ably and tlioroughly. It had been appointed by the 
Infinite Disposer, that tlie liberties, the independence 
of the States of America should depend on the man- 
ner in which we should fight for them ; and who can 



THE COLONIAL AGE OF NEW ENGLAND. 69 

imagine what the issue of the awful experiment 
would have been, had they never before seen the 
gleam of an enemy's bayonets, or heard the beat of 
his drum? 

I hold it to have been a great thing, in the first 
place, that we had among us, at that awful moment 
when the public mind was meditating the question 
of submission to the tea-tax, or resistance by arms, 
and at the more awful moment of the first appeal to 
arms, — that we had some among us who personally 
knew what war was. Washington, Putnam, Stark, 
Gates, Prescott, Montgomery, were soldiers already. 
So were hundreds of others of humbler rank, but 
not yet forgotten by the people whom they helped 
to save, who mustered to the camp of our first revo- 
lutionary armies. These all had tasted a soldier's 
life. They had seen fire, they had felt the thrilling 
sensations, the quickened flow of blood to and from 
the heart, the mingled apprehension and hope, the 
hot haste, the burning thirst, the feverish rapture of 
battle, which he who has not felt is unconscious of 
one half of the capacities and energies of his nature, 
which he who has felt, I am told, never forgets. 
They had slept in the woods on the withered leaves 
or the snow, and awoke to breakfast upon birch bark 
and the tender tops of willow trees. They had kept 
guard on the outposts on many a stormy night, know- 
ing perfectly that the thicket half a pistol-shot off 
was full of French and Indian riflemen. 

I say it was something that we had such men 
among us. They helped discipline our raw first 
levies. They knew what an army is, and what it 
needs, and how to provide for it. They could take 



70 THE COLONIAL AGE OF NEW ENGLAND. 

that young volunteer of sixteen by the hand, sent by 
an Ipswich mother, who, after looking upon her son 
equipped for battle from which he might not return, 
Spartan-like, bid him go and behave like a man — 
and many, many such shouldered a musket for Lex- 
ington and Bunker Hill — and assure him, from their 
own personal knowledge, that after the first fire he 
never would know fear again, even that of the last 
onset. But the long and peculiar wars of New Eng- 
land had done more than to furnish a few" such 
officers and soldiers as these. They had formed that 
public sentiment upon the subject of war which 
reunited all the armies, fought all the battles, and 
won all the glory of the Revolution. The truth is 
that war, in some form or another, had been, from 
the first, one of the usages, one of the habits, of 
colonial life. It had been felt, from the first, to be 
just as necessary as planting or reaping, — to be as 
likely to break out every day and every night as a 
thunder-shower in summer, and to break out as sud- 
denly. There have been nations who boasted that 
their rivers or mountains never saw the smoke of an 
enemy's camp. Here the war-whoop awoke the 
sleep of the cradle ; it startled the dying man on his 
pillow ; it summoned young and old from the meet- 
ing-liouse, from the burial, and from the bridal cere- 
mony, to the strife of death. The consequence Avas, 
that that steady, composed, and reflecting courage 
which belongs to all the English race grew into a 
leading characteristic of New England ; and a public 
sentiment was formed, pervading young and old, and 
both sexes, which declared it lawful, necessary, and 
honorable to risk life, and to shed blood for a great 



THE COLONIAL AGE OF NEW ENGLAND. 71 

cause, — for our family, for our fires, for our God, 
for our country, for our religion. In such a cause it 
declared that the voice of God Himself commanded 
to the field. The courage of New England was the 
'' courage of conscience." It did not rise to that 
insane and awful passion, — the love of war for 
itself. It Avould not have hurried her sons to the 
Nile, or the foot of the pyramids, or across the great 
raging sea of snows which rolled from Smolensko to 
Moscow, to set the stars of glory upon the glowing 
brow of ambition. But it was a courage which at 
Lexington, at Bunker Hill, at Bennington, and at 
Saratoga, had power to brace the spirit for the pa- 
triots' fight, — and gloriously roll back the tide of 
menaced war from their homes, the soil of their 
birth, the graves of their fathers, and the everlasting 
hills of their freedom. 

But I cannot any farther pursue this sketch of the 
life which tasked the youthful spirit of New Eng- 
land. Other labors there were to be done ; other 
trials to pass through ; other influences to discipline 
them and make them fit for the rest which remains 
to the heirs of liberty. 

" So true it is — for such holy rest, 
Strong hands must toil — strong hearts endure.'* 

It was a people thus schooled to the love and at- 
tainments and championship of freedom — its season 
of infant helplessness now long past, the strength 
and generosity and fire of a mighty youth moving 
its limbs, and burning in its eye — a people, whose 
bright spirit had been fed midst the crowned heights, 
with hope and liberty and thoughts of power — this 



72 THE COLONIAL AGK OF NEW ENGLAND. 

was the people whom our Revolution summoned to 
the grandest destiny in the history of nations. They 
were summoned, and a choice put before them ; 
slaver}', Avith present ease and rest and enjoyment, 
but all inglorious — the death of the nation's soul; 
and liberty, with battle and bloodshed, but the spring 
of all national good, of art, of plenty, of genius. 
Liberty born of the skies ! breathing of all their 
odors, and radiant with all their hues ! They were 
bidden to choose, and they chose wisely and greatly. 

" They linked their hands — they pledged their stainless faith 
In the dread presence of attesting Heaven — 1 

Tliey bound tlieir hearts to sufferings and death 
Witli the severe and solemn transport given 
To bless such vows. How man had striven, 
How man might strive, and vainly strive they knew, 
And called upon their God. 

They knelt, and rose in strength." 

I have no need to tell you the story of the Revo- 
lution, if the occasion were to justify it. Some of 
you shared in its strife ; for to that, as to every other 
great duty, Ipswich was more than equal. Some 
who have not yet tasted of death, some perhaps 
even now here, and others who have followed or 
who went before their illustrious La Fayette. All of 
you partake of its fruits. All of you are encom- 
passed about by its glory ! 

But now that our service of commemoration is 
ended, let us go hence and meditate on all that it has 
taught us. You see how long the holy and beautiful 
city of our liberty and our power has been in build- 
ing, and by how many hands, and at what cost. You 
see the towering and steadfast height to which it has 



THE COLONIAL AGE OF NEW ENGLAND. 73 

gone up, and how its turrets and spires gleam in the 
rising and setting sun. You stand among the graves 
of some — your townsmen, your fathers by blood, 
whose names you bear, whose portraits hang up in 
your homes, of whose memory you are justly proud — 
who helped in their day to sink those walls deep in 
their beds, wdiere neither frost nor earthquake might 
heave them, — to raise aloft those great arches of 
stone, — to send up those turrets and spires into the 
sky. It was theirs to build ; remember it is yours, 
under Providence, to keep the city, — to keep it 
from the sword of the invader, — to keep it from 
licentiousness and crime and irreligion, and all that 
would make it unsafe or unfit to live in, — to keep 
it from the fires of faction, of civil strife, of party 
spirit, that might burn up in a day the slow work 
of a thousand years of glory. Happy, if we shall 
so perform our duty that they who centuries hence 
shall dwell among our graves may be able to re- 
member, on some such day as this, in one common 
service of grateful commemoration, their fathers of 
the first and of the second age of America, — those 
who through martyrdom and tempest and battle 
sought liberty, and made her their own, — and those 
whom neither ease nor luxury, nor the fear of man, 
nor the worship of man, could prevail on to barter 
her away ! 



74 THE AGE OF THE PILGRIMS 



THE AGE OF THE PILGRIIVIS THE HEROIC 
PERIOD OF OUR HISTORY: 

AN ADDRESS DELIVERED IN NEW YORK BEFORE THE NEW 
ENGLAND ASSOCIATION, DECEMBER, 1843. 



We meet again, the children of the Pilgrims, to re- 
member our fathers. Away from the scenes with 
which the American portions of their history are 
associated for ever, and in all men's minds, — scenes 
so unadorned, yet clothed to the moral eye with a 
charm above the sphere of taste : the uncrumbled 
rock, the hill from whose side those " delicate sj)rings " 
are still gushing, the wide, brown, low woods, the 
sheltered harbor, the little island that welcomed them 
in their frozen garments from the sea, and witnessed 
the rest and worship of that Sabbath-day before their 
landing, — away from all those scenes, — without the 
limits of the fond old colony that keeps their graves, 
without the limits of the New England which is their 
wider burial place and fitter monument, — in the 
heart of this chief city of the nation into which the 
feeble land has grown, — we meet again, to repeat 
their names one by one, to retrace the lines of their 
character, to recall the lineaments and forms over 
which the grave has no power, to appreciate their 
virtues, to recount the course of their life full of 
heroic deeds, varied by sharpest trials, crowned by 



THE HEROIC PERIOD OF OUR HISTORY. 75 

transcendent consequences, to assert the directness of 
our descent from such an ancestry of goodness and 
greatness, to erect, refresh, and touch our spirits by 
coming for an hour into their more immediate pres- 
ence, such as they were in the days of their human 
*' agony of glory." The two centuries which inter- 
pose to hide them from our eye, centuries so brilliant 
with progress, so crowded by incidents, so fertile in 
accumulations, dissolve away for the moment as a 
curtain of clouds, and we are once more by their side. 
The grand and pathetic series of their story unrolls 
itself around us, vivid as if with the life of yesterday. 
All the stages, all the agents, of the process by which 
they and the extraordinary class they belonged to 
were slowly formed from the general mind and char- 
acter of England ; the influence of the age of the Ref- 
ormation, with which the whole Christian world was 
astir to its profoundest depths and outermost limits, 
but which was poured out unbounded and peculiar 
on them, its children, its impersonation ; that various 
persecution prolonged through two hundred years and 
twelve reigns, from the time of the preaching of 
Wickliffe, to the accession of James I., from which 
they gathered sadly so many precious fruits, — a 
large measure of tenderness of conscience, the sense 
of duty, force of will, trust in God, the love of truth, 
and the spirit of liberty ; the successive development 
and growth of opinions and traits and determinations 
and fortunes by wdiich they were advanced from 
Protestants to Republicans, from Englishmen to Pil- 
grims, from Pilgrims to the founders of a free Church, 
and the fathers of a free people in a new world ; the 
retirement to Holland ; the resolution to seek the 



76 THE AGE OF THE PILGRIMS 

sphere of their duties and the asylum of their rights 
beyond the sea ; the embarkation at Delft Haven, — 
that scene of interest unrivalled, on which a pencil of 
your own has just enabled us to look back with tears, 
praise, and sympathy, and the fond pride of children ; 
that scene of few and simple incidents, just the set- 
ting out of a handful of not then very famous persons 
on a voyage, — quite the commonest of occurrences, 
— but which dilates as you gaze on it, and speaks to 
you as with the voices of an immortal song ; which 
becomes idealized into the auspicious going forth of a 
colony, whose planting has changed the history of the 
world, — a noble colony of devout Christians, edu- 
cated and firm men, valiant soldiers, and honorable 
women ; a colony on the commencement of whose 
heroic enterprise the selectest influences of religion 
seemed to be descending visibl}^ and beyond whose 
perilous path are hung the rainbow and the westward 
star of empire ; the voyage of The Mayflower ; the land- 
ing ; the slow winter's night of disease and famine in 
which so many, the good, the beautiful, the brave, sunk 
dowji and died, giving place at last to the spring- 
dawn of health and plenty ; the meeting Avith the old 
red race on the hill beyond the brook ; the treaty of 
peace unbroken for half a century ; the organization 
of a republican government in The Mayflower cabin ; 
the planting of these kindred and coeval and auxiliar 
institutions without which such a government can no 
more live than the uprooted tree can put forth leaf 
or flower, — institutions to diffuse pure religion ; good 
learning; austere morality ; the practical arts of ad- 
ministration ; labor, patience, obedience ; " plain liv- 
ing and high thinking ; " the securities of conservatism ; 



I 



» 



THE HEROIC PERIOD OF OUR HISTORY. 77 

the germs of progress ; the laymg deep and sure, far 
down on the rock of ages, of the foundation stones 
of the imperial structure, whose dome now swells 
towards heaven ; the timely death at last, one after 
another, of the first generation of the original Pil- 
grims, not un visited, as the final hour drew nigh, by 
visions of the more visible glory of a latter day, — 
all these high, holy, and beautiful things come throng- 
ing fresh on all our memories, beneath the influence 
of the hour. Such as we heard them from our 
mothers' lips, such as we read them in the histories 
of kings, of religions, and of liberty, they gather 
themselves about us ; familiar, certainly, but of an 
interest that can never die, — an interest intrinsical 
in themselves, yet heightened inexpressibly by their 
relations to that eventful future into which they have 
expanded, and through whose lights they show. 

And yet, with all this procession of events and 
persons moving before us, and solicited this way and 
that by the innumerable trains of speculation and of 
feeling Avhich such a sight inspires, we can think 
of nothing and of nobody, here and now, but the 
Pilgrims themselves. I" cannot, and do not, wish 
for a moment to forget that it is their festival we have 
come to keep. It is their tabernacles we have come to 
build. It is not the Reformation, it is not colonization, 
it is not ourselves, our present or our future, it is not 
political econoni}^ or political philosophy, of which to- 
day you Avould have me say a word. We have a 
specific and single duty to perform. We would speak 
of certain valiant, good, and peculiar men, our fathers. 
We would wipe the dust from a few old, plain, noble 
urns. We would shun husky disquisitions, irrelevant 



L 



78 THE AGE OF THE PILGRIMS 

novelties, and small display ; would recall rather and 
merely the forms and lineaments of the heroic dead, 
— forms and features which the grave has not changed, 
over which the grave has no power. 

The Pilgrims, then, of the first generation, just as 
they landed on the rock, are the topic of the hour. 
And in order to insure some degree of unity, and of 
definiteness of aim, and of impression, let me still 
more precisely propound as the subject of our 
thoughts, the Pilgrims, their age and their acts, as 
constituting a real and a true heroic period ; one 
heroic period in the history of this Republic. 

I regard it as a great thing for a nation to be able, 
as it passes through one sign after another of its 
zodiac pathway, in prosperity, in adversity, and at 
all times, — to be able to look to an authentic race of 
founders, and a historical principle of institution, in 
which it may rationally admire the realized idea of 
true heroism. Whether it looks back in the morning 
or evening of its day ; whether it looks back, as now 
we do, in the emulous fervor of its youth, or in the 
full strength of manhood, its breasts full of milk, its 
bones moistened with marrow ; or in dotage and faint- 
ness, the silver cord of union loosened, the golden 
bowl of fame and power broken at the fountain ; 
from the era of Pericles or the era of Plutarch, — it 
is a great and precious thing to be able to ascend to, 
and to repose its strenuous or its wearied virtue 
upon, a heroic age and a heroic race, which it may 
not falsely call its own. I mean by a heroic age and 
race, not exclusively or necessarily the earliest na- 
tional age and race, but one, the course of whose 
history and the traits of whose character, and the 



THE HEROIC PERIOD OF OUR HISTORY. 79 

extent and permanence of whose influences, are of a 
kind and power not merely to be recognized in after 
time as respectable or useful, but of a kind and a 
power to kindle and feed the moral imagination, move 
the capacious heart, and justify the intelligent won- 
der of the world. I mean by a nation's heroic age a 
time distinguished above others, not by chronological 
relation alone, but by a concurrence of grand and im- 
pressive agencies with large results, — by some splen- 
did and remarkable triumph of man over some great 
enemy, some great evil, some great labor, some 
great danger, — by uncommon examples of the rarer 
virtues and qualities, tried by an exigency that oc- 
curs only at the beginning of new epochs, the ascen- 
sion of new dynasties of dominion or liberty, when 
the Q'reat bell of time sounds out another hour. I 
mean an age when extraordinary traits are seen, an 
age performing memorable deeds whereby a whole 
people, whole generations, are made different and 
made better. I mean an age and race to which the 
arts may go back, and find real historical forms and 
groups, wearing the port and grace, and going on the 
errand of demi-gods, — an age far off, on whose 
moral landscape the poet's eye may light, and repro- 
duce a grandeur and beauty stately and eternal, 
transcending that of ocean in storm or at peace, or 
of mountains, staying as with a charm the morning 
star in his steep course, or the twilight of a sum- 
mer's day, or voice of solemn bird, — an age "doc- 
trinal and exemplary," from whose personages, and 
from whose actions, the orator may bring away an 
incident or a thought that shall kindle a fire in ten 
thousand hearts, as on altars to their country's glory 



L 



80 THE AGE OE THE riLGRLSIS 

and to wliicli the discouraged teachers of patriotism 
and morality to corrupted and expiring States may 
resort for examples how to live and how to die. 

You see, then, that certain peculiar conditions and 
elements must meet to make a heroic period and a 
heroic race. You might call, without violence, the 
men who brought on and went through the war of 
Independence, or fell 6n the high places of its fields, 
— you might call them and their times heroic. But 
you would not so describe the half-dozen years from 
the peace to the Constitution, nor the wise men who 
framed that writing, nor the particular generation 
that had the sagacity and the tone to adopt it. Yet 
was this a grander achievement than many a York- 
town, many a Saratoga, many a Eutaw Springs ; and 
this, too, in some just sense was the beginning of a 
national experience. To justify the application of 
this epithet, there must be in it somewhat in the 
general character of a period, and the character and 
fortunes of its actors, to warm the imagination and 
to touch the heart. There must, therefore, be some 
of the impressive forms of danger there ; there must 
be the reality of suffering, borne with the dignity of 
an unvanquished soul ; there must be pity and terror 
in the epic, as in the tragic volume ; there must be a 
great cause, acting on a conspicuous stage, or swell- 
ing towards an imperial consummation ; some great 
interest of humanity must be pleading there on fields 
of battle, or in the desert, or on the sea ! 

When these constituents, or such as these, concur, 
there is a heroic time and race. Other thingrs are of 
small account. It may be an age of rude manners. 
Prominent men may cook their own suppers, like 



THE HEROIC PERIOD OF OUR HISTORY. 81 

Achilles, yet how many millions of imaginations, 
besides Alexander's, have trembled at his anger, 
shuddered at his revenge, sorrowed with his griefs, 
kindled with his passion of glory, melted as he turns 
gently and kindly from the tears of Priam, childless, 
or bereaved of his dearest and bravest by his un- 
matched arm ! — divine faces, like that of Rose Stand- 
ish in the picture, may look out, as hers there does, 
not from the worst possible head-dress ; men may 
have worn steeple-crowned hats, and long, peculiar 
beards ; they may have been austere, formal, intol- 
erant ; they may have themselves possessed not one 
ray of fancy, not one emotion of taste, not one sus- 
ceptibility to the grace and sublimity that there are 
in nature and genius ; yet may their own lives and 
deaths have been a whole Iliad in action, grander, 
sweeter, of more mournful pathos, of more purifying 
influences, than any thing yet sung by old or modern 
bard, in hall or bower. See, then, if we can find any 
of the constituents of such a period in the character, 
time, and fortunes of the Pilgrims. 

"Plantations," says Lord Bacon, "are amongst 
ancient, primitive, and heroical works." But he is 
thinking of plantations as they are the king's works, 
like parks or palaces, or solemn temples, or steadfast 
pyramids, as they show forth the royal mind, and 
heighten the royal glory. We are to seek the hero- 
ical ingredient in the planter himself, in the ends 
for which he set forth, the difficulties with which he 
contended, the triumphs which he won, the teeming 
harvest sprung from seed sown with his tears. And 
we shall find it there. 

It would be interesting, if it were possible, which 

6 



82 THE AGE OF THE PILGRIMS i 

1 

it is not, to pause for a moment first, and survey the 
old English Puritan character, of which the Pilgrims 
were a variety. Turn to the class of which they 
were part, and consider it well for a minute in all 
its aspects. I see in it an extraordinary mental and 
moral phenomenon. Many more graceful and more 
winning forms of the human nature there have been, 
and are, and shall be. Many men, many races, there 
are, have been, and shall be, of more genial disposi- 
tions, more tasteful accomplishment, a quicker eye 
for the beautiful of art and nature ; less disagree- 
ably absorbed, less gloomily careful and troubled 
about the mighty interests of the spiritual being or 
of the commonwealth ; wearing a more decorated 
armor in battle ; contributing more wit, more song, 
and heartier potations to the garland feast of life. 
But where, in the long series of ages that furnish the 
matter of history, was there ever one — where one 
— better fitted by the possession of the highest traits 
of man to do the noblest work of man, — better 
fitted to consummate and establish the Reformation, 
save the English constitution at its last gasp from 
the fate of all other European constitutions, and pre- 
pare, on the granite and iced mountain-summits of 
the New World, a still safer rest, for a still better 
liberty? 

I can still less pause to trace the history of these 
men as a body, or even to enumerate the succession 
of influences — the spirit of the Reformation within, 
two hundred years of civil and spiritual tyranny 
without — Avhich, between the preaching of Wick- 
liffe and the accession of James L, had elaborated 
them out of the general mind of England ; had at- 



THE HEROIC PERIOD OF OUR HISTORY. 83 

tracted to their ranks so much of what was wisest 
and best of their nation and time ; had cut and 
burned, as it were, into their natures the iron quality 
of the higher heroism, — and so accomplished them 
for their great work there and here. The whole 
story of the cause and the effect is told in one of 
their own illustrations a little expanded : " Puritan- 
ism was planted in the region of storms, and there 
it grew. Swayed this way and that by a whirlwind 
of blasts all adverse, it sent down its roots below 
frost, or drought, or the bed of the avalanche ; its 
trunk went up, erect, gnarled, seamed, not riven by 
the bolt; the evergreen enfolded its branches; its 
blossom was like to that ' ensanguined flower in- 
scribed with woe.' " 

One influence there was, however, I would mark, 
whose jjermanent and various agency on the doctrines, 
the character, and the destinies of Puritanism, is 
among the most striking things in the whole history 
of opinion. I mean its contact with the republican 
reformers of the continent, and particularly with 
those of Geneva. 

In all its stages, certainly down to the peace of 
Westphalia, in 1648, all the disciples of the Reforma- 
tion, wherever they lived, were in some sense a sin- 
gle brotherhood, whom diversity of speech, hostility 
of governments, and remoteness of place, could not 
wholly keep apart. Local persecutions drew the tie 
closer. In the reign of Mary, from 1553 to 1558, a 
thousand learned Eng^lishmen fled from the stake at 
home, to the happier states of continental Protestant- 
ism. Of these, great numbers (I know not how many) 
came to Geneva. There they awaited the- death of 



84 THE AGE OP THE PILGRIMS 

the Queen ; and then, sooner or later, but in the 
time of Elizabeth, went back to England. 

I ascribe to that five 3'ears in Geneva an influence 
which has changed the history of the world. I seem 
to myself to trace to it, as an influence on the Eng- 
lish race, a new theology ; new politics ; another 
tone of character ; the opening of another era of 
time and of liberty. I seem to myself to trace to it 
the great civil war of England ; the Republican Con- 
stitution framed in the cabin of The Mayflower ; the 
divinity of Jonathan Edwards ; the battle of Bunker 
Hill ; the Independence of America. In that brief 
season, English Puritanism was changed fundament- 
ally, and for ever. Why should we think this extraor- 
dinary ? There are times when whole years pass 
over the head of a man, and work no change of mind 
at all. There are others again, when, in an hour, 
old things pass away, and all things become new! 
A verse of the Bible ; a glorious line of some old 
poet, dead a thousand years before; the new-made 
grave of a child ; a friend killed by a thunder-bolt ; 
some single, more intolerable pang of despised love ; 
some more intolerable act of '' the oppressor's wrong, 
the proud man's contumely ; " a gleam of rarer beauty 
on a lake, or in the sky ; something slighter than the 
fall of a leaf, or a bird's song on the shore, — trans- 
forms him as in the twinkling of an eye. When, 
before or since, in the history of the world, was the 
human character subjected to an accumulation of 
agents so fitted to create it all anew as those which 
encompassed the English exiles at Geneva ? 

I do not make much account in this of the mate- 
rial grandeur and beaut}^ which burst on their aston- 



THE HEROIC PERIOD OF OUR HISTORY. 85 

ished senses there, as around the solitude of Patmos, 
— although I cannot say that I know, or that any- 
body knows, that these mountain summits, ascending, 
"from their silent sea of pines," higher than the 
thunder cloud, reposing among their encircling stars, 
while the storm sweeps by below, before which 
navies, forests, the cathedral tombs of kings, go 
down, all on fire with the rising and descending 
glory of the sun, wearing his rays as a crown, un- 
changed, unsealed ; the contrasted lake ; the arrowy 
Rhone and all his kindred torrents ; the embosomed 
city, — I cannot say that these things have no power 
to touch and fashion the nature of man. I cannot 
say that in the leisure of exile a cultivated and pious 
mind, oj^ened, softened, tinged with a long sorrow, 
haunted by a brooding apprehension, perplexed by 
mysterious providences, waiting for the unravelling of 
the awful drama in England, — a mind, if such there 
were, like Luther's, like Milton's, like Zwingle's, — 
might not find itself stayed and soothed, and carried 
upward, at some evening hour, by these great sym- 
bols of a duration without an end, and a throne 
above the sky. I cannot say that such an impression 
might not be deepened by a renewed view, until 
the outward glory reproduced itself in the inward 
strength ; or until 

" The dilating soul, enwrapt, transfused, 
Into the mighty vision passing there. 
As in her natural form, swelled vast to heaven." 

Nobody can say that. 

It is of the moral agents of change that I would 
speak. I pass over the theology which they learned 
there, to remark on the politics which they learned. 



I 



86 THE AGE OF THE PILGRIMS ' 

The asylum into which they had been admitted, the 
city which had opened its arms to pious, learned 
men, banished by the tyranny of an English throne 
and an English hierarchy, was a republic. In the 
giant hand of guardian mountains, on the banks of 
a lake lovelier than a dream of the Fair}^ Land, in 
a valley which might seem hollowed out to enclose 
the last home of liberty, there smiled an independ- 
ent, peaceful, law-abiding, well-governed, and pros- 
perous commonwealth. There was a state without 
king or nobles ; there was a church without a bishop ; 
there was a people governed by grave magistrates 
which it had selected, and equal laws which it had 
framed. And to the eye of these exiles, bruised and 
pierced through by the accumulated oppressions of 
a civil and spiritual tyrann}^ to whom there came 
tidings every day from England that another victim 
had been struck down, on whose still dear home in 
the sea every day a gloomier shadow seemed to fall 
from the frowning heights of power, was not that 
republic the brightest image in the whole transcend- 
ent scene ? Do you doubt that they turned from 
Alpine beauty and Alpine grandeur, to look with a 
loftier emotion, for the first time in their lives, on 
the serene, unveiled statue of classical Liberty? Do 
you not think that this spectacle, in these circum- 
stances, prompted in such minds pregnant doubts, 
daring hopes, new ideas, thoughts that wake to per- 
ish never, doubts, hopes, ideas, thoughts, of which 
a new age is born ? Was it not then and there that 
the dream of republican liberty — a dream to be 
realized somewhere, perhaps in England, perhaps in 
some region of the Western sun — first mingled it- 



THE HEROIC PERIOD OF OUR HISTORY. 87 

self with the general impulses, the garnered hopes, 
of the Reformation? Was that dream ever let go, 
down to the morning of that day when the Pilgrims 
met in the cabin of their shattered bark, and there, 
as she rose full on the stern New England sea, and 
the voices of the November forest rang through her 
torn topmast rigging, subscribed the first republican 
constitution of the New World ? I confess myself 
of the opinion of those wlio trace to this spot and 
that time the Republicanism of the Puritans. I do 
not suppose, of course, that they went back with the 
formal design to change the government of Eng- 
land. The contests and the progress of seventy 
years more were required to mature and realize so 
vast a conception as that. I do not suppose, either, 
that learned men — students of antiquity, the read- 
ers of Aristotle and Thucydides and Cicero, the con- 
temporaries of Buchanan, the friends of his friend, 
John Knox — needed to go to Geneva to acquire 
the idea of a commonwealth. But there they saw 
the problem solved. Popular government was pos- 
sible. The ancient prudence and the modern, the 
noble and free genius of the old Paganism and the 
Christianity of the Reformation, law and liberty, 
might be harmoniously blended in living systems. 
This experience they never forgot. 

I confess, too, that I love to trace the pedigree of 
our transatlantic liberty, thus backwards through 
Switzerland, to its native land of Greece. I think 
this the true line of succession, down which it has 
been transmitted. There was a liberty which the 
Puritans found, kept, and improved in England. 
They would have changed it, and were not able. 



88 THE AGE OF THE PILGRIMS 

But that was a kind which admitted and demanded 
an inequality of many ; a subordination of ranks ; a 
favored eldest son ; the ascending orders of a hie- 
rarchy ; the vast and constant pressure of a super- 
incumbent crown. It was the liberty of feudalism. 
It was the liberty of a limited monarchy, over- 
hung and shaded by the imj)Osing architecture of 
great antagonistic elements of the state. Such 
was not the form of liberty which our fathers 
brought with them. Allowing, of course, for that 
anomalous tie which connected them with the Eng- 
lish crown three thousand miles off, it was repub- 
lican freedom, as perfect the moment they stepped 
on the rock as it is to-day. It had not been all 
born in the woods of Germany; by the Elbe or fl 
Eyder ; or the plains of Runnymede. It was the 
child of other climes and days. It sprang to life in 
Greece. It gilded next the early and the middle 
age of Italy. It then reposed in the hallowed breast 
of the Alps. It descended at length on the iron- 
bound coast of New England, and set the stars of 
glory there. At every stage of its course, at every 
reappearance, it was guarded by some new security ; 
it was embodied in some new element of order ; it 
was fertile in some larger good ; it glowed with a 
more exceeding beauty. Speed its way ; perfect its 
nature 1 

"Take, Freedom ! take tliy radiant round, 
When dimmed revive, when lost return, 
Till not a slirine through earth be found 
On which thy glories shall not burn." 

Tluis were laid the foundations of the mind and 
character of Puritanism. Thus, slowly, by the 



THE HEROIC PEKIOD OF OUR HISTORY. 89 

breath of the spirit of the age, by the influence of 
iindefiled religion, by freedom of the soul, by much 
tribulation, by a wider survey of man, nature, and 
human life, it was trained to its work of securing 
and improving the liberty of England, and giving 
to America a better liberty of her own. Its day 
over and its duty done, it was resolved into its ele- 
ments, and disappeared among the common forms 
of humanity, apart from which it had acted and 
suffered, above which it had to move, out of which 
by a long process it had been elaborated. Of this 
stock Avere the Pilgrim Fathers. They came of 
heroical companionship. Were their works heroical ? 
The planting of a colony in a new world, which 
may grow, and which does grow, to a great nation, 
where there was none before, is intrinsically, and 
in the judgment of the world, of the largest order 
of human achievement. Of the chief of men are 
the eonditores imperiorum.^ To found a state upon a 
waste earth, wherein groat numbers of human beings 
may live together, and in successive generations, 
socially and in peace, knit to one another by the 
innumerous ties, light as air, stronger than links 
of iron, which compose the national existence, — 
wherein they may help each other, and be helped in 
bearing the various lot of life, — wherein they may 
enjoy and improve, and impart and heighten enjoy- 
ment and improvement, — wherein they may to- 
gether perform the great social labors, may reclaim 
and decorate the earth, may disinter the treasures 
I that grow beneath its surface, may invent and polish 
the arts of usefulness and beauty, may perfect the 
loftier arts of virtue and empire, open and work the 



90 THE AGE OF THE PILGRIMS 

richer mines of the universal youthful heart and 
intellect, and spread out a dwelling for the Muse on 
the glittering summits of Freedom, — to found such 
a state is first of heroical labors and heroical glories. 
To build a pyramid or a harbor, to write an epic 
poem, to construct a system of the universe, to take 
a city, are great, or may be, but far less than this. 

He, then, who sets a colony on foot, designs a great 
work. He designs alt the good, and all the glory, of 
which, in the series of ages, it may be the means ; 
and he shall be judged more by the lofty ultimate 
aim and result than by the actual instant motive. 
You may well admire, therefore, the solemn and 
adorned plausibilities of the colonizing of Rome from 
Tro}^ in the ^neid ; though the leader had been 
burned out of house and home, and could not choose 
but go. You may find in the flight of the female 
founder of the gloomy greatness of Carthage a cer- 
tain epic interest; yet w^as she running from the 
madness of her husband, to save her life. Emigra- 
tions from our stocked communities of undeified men 
and women, — emigrations for conquest, for gold, for 
very restlessness of spirit, — if they grow towards an 
imperial issue, have all thus a prescriptive and rec- 
osrnized imxredient of heroism. But when the im- 
mediate motive is as grand as the ultimate hope was 
lofty, and the ultimate success splendid, then, to use 
an expression of Bacon's, " the music is fuller." 

I distinguish, then, this enterprise of our fathers, 
in the first place, by the character of the immediate 
motive. 

And that was, first, a sense of religious duty. 
They had adopted opinions in religion which they 



t 



THE HEliOIC PERIOD OE OUR HISTORY. 91 

fully believed they ought to profess, and a mode of 
public worship and ordinances which they fully 
believed they ought to observe. They could not do 
so in England ; and they went forth — man, woman, 
the infant at the breast — across an ocean in winter, 
to find a wilderness where they could. To the ex- 
tent of this motive, therefore, they went forth to 
glorify God, and by obeying his written will, and his 
will unwritten, but uttered in the voice of conscience 
concerning the chief end of man. 

It was next a thirst for freedom from unnecessary 
restraint, which is tyranny, — freedom of the soul, 
freedom of thought, a larger measure of freedom of 
life, — a thirst which two centuries had been kindling, 
a thirst which must be slaked, though but from the 
mountain torrent, though but from drops falling from 
the thunder cloud, though but from fountains lone 
and far, and guarded as the diamond of the desert. 

These were the motives, — the sense of duty, and 
the spirit of liberty. Great sentiments, great in man, 
in nations, " pregnant with celestial fire ! " — where- 
withal could you fashion a people for the contentions 
and honors and uses of the imperial state so well as 
by exactly these ? To what, rather than these, would 
you wish to trace up the first beatings of the nation's 
heart? If, from the whole field of occasion and 
motive, you could have selected the very passion, the 
very chance, which should begin your history, the 
very texture and pattern and hue of the glory which 
should rest on its first days, could you have chosen 
so well? The sense of duty, the spirit of liberty, not 
prompting to vanity or luxury or dishonest fame, to 
glare or clamor or hollow circumstance of being, 



92 THE AGE OF THE PILGRIMS 

silent, intense, earnest, of force to walk through the 
furnace of fire, yea, the valley of the shadow of 
death, to o^Dcn a path amid the sea, to make the 
wilderness to bud and blossom as the rose, to turn 
back half a world in arms, to fill the amplest meas- 
ure of a nation's praise ! 

I am glad, then, that one of our own poets could 

truly say, — 

"Nor lure of conquest's meteor beam, 
Nor dazzling mines of fancy's dream, 
Nor wild adventure's love to roam, 
Brought from their fathers' ancient home. 
O'er the wide sea, the Pilgrim host !" 

I should be glad of it, if I were looking back to the 
past of our history merely for the moral picturesque, 

— if I were looking back merely to find splendid 
moral scenery, mountain elevations, falls of water 
watched by the rainbow of sunlight and moonlight, 
colossal forms, memorable deeds, renown and grace 
that could not die, — if I were looking merely to find 
materials for sculpture, for picture, for romance, — 
subjects for the ballad by which childhood shall be sung 
to sleep, subjects for the higher minstrelsy that may fill 
the eye of beauty and swell the bosom of manhood, 

— if I were looking back for these alone, I should be 
glad that the praise is true. Even to such an eye, 
the embarkation of the Pilgrims and the lone path of 
The Mayflower upon the " astonished sea " were a 
grander sight than navies of mightiest admirals seen 
beneath the lifted clouds of battle ; grander than the 
serried ranks of armed men moving by tens of thou- 
sands to the music of an unjust glory. If you take to 
pieces and carefully inspect all the efforts, all the situ- 
ations, of that moral sublime which gleams forth, here 



THE HEROIC PERIOD OF OUR HISTORY. 93 

and there, in the true or the feigned narrative of human 
things, — deaths of martyrs, or martyred patriots, or 
heroes in the hour of victory, revolutions, reformations, 
self-sacrifices, fields lost or won, — you will find nothing 
nobler at their source than the motives and the hopes 
of that ever-memorable voj^age. These motives and 
these hopes — the sacred sentiments of duty, obe- 
dience to the will of God, religious trust, and the 
spirit of liberty — have inspired, indeed, all the 
beautiful and all the grand in the histor}^ of man. 
The rest is commonplace. "The rest is vanity; the 
rest is crime." 

I distinguished this enterprise of our fathers, next, 
by certain peculiarities of trial which it encountered 
and vanquished on the shores of the New World. 
You have seen the noble spring of character and 
motive from which the current of our national for- 
tunes has issued forth. You can look around you 
to-day, and see into how broad and deep a stream 
that current has ex23anded ; what beams of the sun, 
still climbing the eastern sky, play on its surface ; 
what accumulations of costly and beautiful things it 
bears along; through what valley of happhiess and 
rest it rolls towards some mightier sea. But turn for 
a moment to its earlier course. 

The first generation of the Pilgrims arrived in 
1620. I suppose that within fifty years more that 
generation had wholly passed away. Certainly its 
term of active labor and responsible care had been 
accomplished. Looking to its actual achievements, 
our first, perhaps our final, impulse is, not to pity, but 
to congratulate, these ancient dead on the felicity and 
the glory of their lot on earth. In that brief time. 



94 THE AGE OF THE PILGRIMS 



\ 



not the full age of man, — in the years of nations, in 
the larger cycles of the race, less than a moment, — 
the New England which to-day we love, to which our 
hearts untravelled go back, even from this throne of 
the American commercial world, — that New England, 
in her groundwork and essential nature, was estab- 
lished for ever between her giant mountains and her 
espoused sea. There already — ay, in The May- 
flower's cabin, before they set foot on shore — was 
representative rej)ublican government. There were 
the congenial institutioiis and sentiments from which 
such government imbibes its power of life. There 
already, side by side, were the securities of conser- 
vatism and the germs of progress. There already fl 
were the congregational church and the free school ; 
the trial by jury ; the statutes of distributions ; just 
so much of the written and unwritten reason of Engr- 
land as might fitl}^ compose the jurisprudence of 
liberty. By a happy accident, or instinct, there al- 
ready was the legalized and organized town, that 
seminary and central point, and exemplification of 
elementary democracy. Silently adopted, everywhere 
and in all things assumed, penetrating and tingeing 
every thing, — the church, the government, law, 
education, the very structure of the mind itself, — 
was the grand doctrine, that all men are born equal 
and born free, that they are born to the same inher- 
itance exactly of chances and of hopes ; that every 
child, on every bosom, of right ought to be, equally 
with every other, invited and stimulated, by every 
social and every political influence, to strive for the 
happiest life, the largest future, the most conspicuous ^ 
virtue, the fullest mind, the brightest wreath. 



THE HEROIC PERIOD OF OUR HISTORY. 95 

There already were all, or the chief and higher 
influences, by which comes the heart of a nation. 
There was reverence of law, — " Our guardian angel, 
and our aveno-ins: fiend." There were the councils 
of the still venerated aged. There was the open 
Bible. There were marriage, baptism, the bnrial of 
the dead, the keeping of the Sabbath-day, the purity 
of a sister's love, a mother's tears, a father's careful 
brow. All these there had been provided and gar- 
nered up. With how much practical sagacity they 
had been devised ; how skilfully adapted to the 
nature of things and the needs of men ; how well 
the principle of permanence had been harmonized 
with the principle of progression ; what diffusiveness 
and immortality of fame they will insure, — we have 
lived late enough to know. On these works, legible 
afar off, cut deep beyond the tooth of time, the long 
procession of the generations shall read their names. 

But we should miss the grandest and most salutary 
lesson of our heroic age, we should miss the best 
proof and illustration of its heroic claims, if we 
should permit the wisdom with which that genera- 
tion acted to hide from our view the intensity and 
dignity with which they suffered. It was therefore 
that I was about to distinguish this enterprise, in the 
second place, by certain peculiarities of its trials. 

The general fact and the mournful details of that 
extremit}' of suffering which marked the first few 
years from the arrival, you all know. It is not these 
I design to repeat. We have heard from our mothers' 
lips, that, although no man or woman or child per- 
ished by the arrow, mightier enemies encompassed 
them at the very water's edge. Of the whole num- 



96 THE AGE OF THE PILGRIxMS 

ber of one hundred, one half Landed to die within a 
year, — ahnost one half in the first three months, — 
to die of disease brought on by the privations and 
confinement of the voyage, by wading to the land, 
by insufficient and unfit food and dress and habita- 
tion, — brought on thus, but rendered mortal by 
want of that indispensable and easy provision which 
Christianity, which Civilization everywhere makes 
for all their sick. Once seven only were left in 
health and strength to attend on the others. There 
and tlius they died. " In a battle," said the admira- 
ble Robinson, writing from Leyden to the survivors 
in the June after they landed, — "in a battle it is 
not looked for but that divers should die ; it is 
thought well for a side, if it get the victory, though 
with the loss of divers, if not too many or too great." 
But how sore a mortality in less than a year, almost 
within a fourth of that time, of fifty in one hundred ! 
In a late visit to Plj'mouth, I sought the spot 
where these earlier dead were buried. It was on a 
bank, somewhat elevated, near, fronting, and looking 
upon the waves, — symbol of what life had been to 
them, — ascending inland behind and above the rock, 
— symbol also of that Rock of Ages on which the 
dying had rested in the final hour. As the Pilgrims 
found these localities, you might stand on that bank 
and hear the restless waters chafe and melt aoainst 
that steadfast base ; the unquiet of the world com- 
posing itself at the portals of the grave. There cer- 
tainly were buried the first governor, and Rose, the 
wife of Miles Standish. " You will go to them," 
wrote Robinson in the same letter from which I have 
quoted ; " but they shall not return to you." 



THE HEROIC PERIOD OF OUR HISTORY. 97 

When tills sharp calamity had abated, and before, 

i] came famme. " I have seen," said Edward Winslow, 
" strong men staggering through faintness for want 

Ij of food." And after this, and during all this, and 
for years, there brooded in every mind, not a weak 
fear, but an intelligent apprehension, that at any in- 
stant — at midnight, at noonday, at the baptism, at 
the burial, in the hour of prayer — a foe more cruel 
than the grave might blast in an hour that which 
disease and Avant had so hardly let live. How they 

I bore all this, you also know. One fact suffices. 

f When in April The Mayflower sailed for England, 

'! Dot one Pilgrim was found to go. 

The peculiarity which has seemed to me to distin- 
guish these trials of the Pilgrim Age from those, 
from the chief of those, which the general voice of 
literature lias concurred to glorify as the trials of 
heroism ; the peculiarity which gives to these, and 
such as these, the attributes of a truer heroism, is 
this, — that they had to meet them on what was then 
an humble, obscure, and distant stage ; with no nu- 
merous audience to look on and applaud, and cast 
its wreaths on the fainting brow of him whose life 
was rushing with his blood, and unsustained by a 
single one of those stronger and more stimulating 
and impulsive passions and aims and sentiments, 
which carry a soldier to his grave of honor as joyfully 
as to the bridal bed. Where were the Pilgrims while 
in this furnace of affliction ? Who saw and cared for 
them ? A hundred persons, understood to be Lol- 
lards, or Precisians, or Puritans, or BroAvnists, had 
sailed away some three thousand miles, to arrive on 
a winter's coast, in order to be where they could 

7 



98 THE AGE OF THE PILGKIMS 

hear a man preach without a surplice ! That was 
just about all, England, or the whole world of civili- 
zation, at first knew, or troubled itself to believe, 
about the matter. If every one had died of lung 
fever, or starved to death, or fallen by the tomahawk, 
that first winter, and The Mayflower had carried 
the news, I wonder how many of even the best in 
England — the accomplished, the beautiful, the dis- 
tinguished, the wise — would have heard of it. A 
heart, or more than one, in Leyden, would have 
broken ; and that had been all. I wonder if Kinof 
James would have cried as heartily as in the '' For- 
tunes of Nigel " he does in anticipation of his own 
death and the sorrow of his subjects ! I wonder what 
in a later day the author of " Hudibras " and the 
author of the "Hind and Panther" would have 
found to say about it, for the wits of Cliarles the 
Second's court. What did anybody even in Puritan 
England know of these Pilgrims? They had been 
fourteen years in Holland; English Puritanism was 
taking care of itself! They were alone on the earth ; 
and there they stood directly, and only, in their great 
Taskmaster's eye. Unlike even the martyrs, around 
whose ascending chariot-wheels and horses of fire, 
congregations might come to sj-mpathize, and bold 
blasphemers to be defied and stricken with awe, — 
these were all alone. Those two ranges of small 
houses, not over ten in all, Avith oil paper for win- 
dows ; that ship. The Mayflower, riding at the dis- 
tance of a mile, — these were every memorial and 
trace of friendly civilization in New England. Pri- 
meval forests, a winter sea, a winter sky, enclosed 
them about, and shut out every approving and every 



THE HEROIC PERIOD OF OUR HISTORY. 99 

sympathizing eye of man ! To play the part of hero- 
ism on its high places is not difficult. To do it alone, 
as seeing Him who is invisible, was the gigantic 
achievement of our age and our race of heroism. 

I have said, too, that a peculiarity in their trial 
was, that they were unsustained altogether by every 
one of the passions, aims, stimulants, and excita- 
tions, — the anger, the revenge, the hate, the pride, 
the awakened dreadful thirst of blood, the consum- 
ing love of glory, that burn, as in volcanic isles, in 
the heart of a mere secularized heroism. Not one 
of all these aids did, or could, come in use for them 
at all. Their character and their situation, both, 
excluded them. Their enemies were disease, walking 
in darkness and wasting at noonday ; famine which, 
more than all other calamity, bows the spirit of man, 
and teaches him what he is ; the wilderness ; spirit- 
ual foes in the high places of the unseen world. 
Even when the first Indian was killed, — in presence 
of which enemy, let me say, not one ever quailed, — 
the exclamation of Robinson was, " Oh, that you had 
converted some, before you had killed any ! " 

Now, I say, the heroism which in a great cause 
can look all the more terrible ills that flesh is heir 
to calmly in the face, and can tread them out as 
sparks under its feet without these aids, is at least 
as lofty a quality as that which cannot. To my eye, 
as I look back, it looms on the shores of the past 
with a more towering grandeur. It seems to me to 
speak from our far ancestral life, a higher lesson, to 
a nobler nature ; certainly it is the rarer and more 
difficult species. If one were called on to select the 
more ghttering of the instances of military heroism 



100 THE AGE OF THE PILGRIMS 

to which the admiration of the world has been most 
attracted, he would make choice, I imagine, of the 
instance of that desperate valor, with which, in 
obedience to the laws, Leonidas and his three hun- 
dred Spartans, cast themselves headlong at the passes 
of Greece on the myriads of their Persian invaders. 
From the simple Jjage of Herodotus, longer than 
from the Am^^thictyonic monument, or the games of 
the commemoration, that act speaks still to the tears 
and praise of all the world. Yet I agree v/ith a late 
brilliant writer in his speculation on the probable 
feelings of that devoted band, left alone, or waiting, 
till day should break, the approach of a certain death 
in that solitary defile. " Their enthusiasm, and that 
rigid and Spartan spirit which had made all ties sub- 
servient to obedience to the law, all excitement tame 
to that of battle, all pleasures dull to the anticipation 
of glory, probably rendered the hour preceding death 
the most enviable of their lives. They might have 
exulted in the same elevating fanaticism which dis- 
tinguished afterwards the followers of Mahomet, and 
have seen that opening paradise in immortality be- 
low, which the Moslemin beheld in anticipation 
above." Judge if it were not so. Judge if a more 
decorated and conspicuous stage was ever erected 
for the transaction of a deed of fame. Every eye 
in Greece ; every eye throughout the world of civi- 
lization, — throughout even the civilized and bar- 
baric East, — was felt to be turned directly on the 
playing of that brief part. There passed round that 
narrow circle in the tent, the stern, warning image of 
Sparta, pointing to their shields and saying, " With 
these to-morrow, or upon them ! " Consider that 



THE HEROIC PERIOD OF OUR HISTORY. 101 

the one concentrated and comprehensive sentiment, 
graven on their souls as by fire and by steel ; by all 
the influences of their whole life ; by the mother's 
lips ; by the father's example ; by the law ; by ven- 
erated religious rites ; by j)^^blic opinion strong 
enough to change the moral qualities of things ; by 
the whole fashion and nature of Spartan culture, 
was this : seek first, seek last, seek always, the 
glory of conquering or falling on a well-fought field. 
Judge if that night, as they watched the dawn of 
the last morning their eyes could ever see ; as they 
heard with every passing hour the hum of the in- 
vading host, his dusky lines stretched out without 
end, and now almost encircling them around ; as 
they remembered their unprofaned home, city of 
heroes and of the mothers of heroes ; judge if 
watching there in the gateway of Greece, this sen- 
timent did not grow to the nature of madness ; if 
it did not run in torrents of literal fire to and from 
the laboring heart. When morning came and passed, 
and they had dressed their long locks, and when at 
noon the countless and glittering throng was seen at 
last to move, was it not with rapture, as if all the 
enjoyment of all the sensations of life was in that 
one moment, that they cast themselves, with the 
fierce gladness of mountain torrents, on that brief 
revelry of glory? 

I acknowledge the splendor of that transaction in 
all its aspects. I admit its morality, too, and its 
useful influence on every Grecian heart, in that her 
great crisis. And yet do you not think, that whoso 
could by adequate description bring before you that 
first winter of the Pilgrims ; its brief sunshine ; the 



102 THE AGE OF THE PILGRIMS 

niglits of storms slow waning ; its damp or icy breath 
felt on the pillow of the dying ; its destitution ; its 
contrasts with all their former exj^erience of life ; its 
insulation and utter loneliness ; its death-beds and 
burials ; its memories ; its apprehensions ; its hopes ; 
the consultations of the prudent : the prayers of the 
pious ; the occasional hymn which may have soothed 
the spirit of Luther, in which the strong heart threw 
off its burthen and asserted its unvanquished nature ; 
do you not think that whoso could describe them 
calmly waiting in that defile, lonelier and darker 
than Thermopylc8, for a morning that might never 
dawn, or might show them when it did, a mightier 
arm than the Persian, raised as in act to strike, 
would he not sketch a scene of more difficult and 
rarer heroism, — a scene, as Wordsworth has said, 
" Melancholy, yea dismal, yet consolatory and full 
of joy," — a scene even better fitted than that to 
succor, to exalt, to lead the forlorn hopes of all great 
causes till time shall be no more ? 

I can seem to see, as that hard and dark season 
was passing away, a diminished procession of these 
Pilgrims following another, dearly loved and newly 
dead, to that bank of graves, and pausing sadly 
there before they shall turn away to see that face 
no more. In full view from that spot is The May- 
flower still riding at her anchor, but to sail in a few 
days more for England, leaving them alone, the liv- 
ing and the dead, to the weal or woe of their new 
home. I cannot say what was the entire emotion of 
that moment and that scene ; but the tones of the 
venerated elder's voice, as they gathered round him, 
were full of cheerful trust, and they went to hearts 



THE HEROIC PERIOD OF OUR HISTORY. 103 

as noble as his own. " This spot," he might say, 
"this line of shore, yea, this whole land, grows 
dearer daity, were it only for the precious dust 
which we have committed to its bosom. I would 
sleep here and have my own hour come, rather than 
elsewhere, with those who shared with us in our 
exceeding labors, whose burdens are now unloosed 
for ever. I would be near them in the last day, and 
have a part in their resurrection. And now," he 
proceeded, " let us go from the side of the grave to 
work with all our might that which we have to do. 
It is on my mind that our night of sorrow is well- 
nigh ended, and that the joy of our morning is at 
hand. The breath of the pleasant south-west is 
here, and the singing of birds. The sore sickness 
is stayed ; somewhat more than half our number 
still remain ; and among these some of our best and 
wisest, though others are fallen on sleep. Matter 
of joy and thanksgiving it is, that among you all, 
the living and the dead, I know not one, even when 
disease had touched him, and sharp grief had made 
his heart as a little child's, who desired, yea, who 
could have been entreated, to go back to England 
by yonder ship. Plainly is it God's will that we 
stand or fall here. All His providences these hun- 
dred years declare it as with beams of the sun. Did 
He not set His bow in the clouds in that bitterest 
hour of our embarking, and build His glorious ark 
upon the sea for us to sail through hitherward? 
Wherefore, let us stand in our lot ! If He prosper 
us, we shall found a church against which the gates 
of hell shall not prevail ; and a colony, yea, a nation, 
by which all other nations shall be healed. Millions 



104 THE AGE OF THE PILGRIMS 

shall spring from our loins, and trace back with lin- 
eal love their blood to ours. Centuries hereafter, in 
great cities, the capitals of might}^ States, from the 
tribes of a common Israel, shall come together the 
good, the eminent, the beautiful, to remember our 
dark day of small things ; yea, generations shall 
call us blessed ! " 

Without a sigh, calmly, with triumph, they sent 
The Mayflower away, and went back, these stern, 
strong men, all, all, to their imperial labors. 

I have said that I deemed it a great thing for a 
nation, in all the periods of its fortunes, to be able 
to look back to a race of founders and a principle 
of institution in which it might seem to see the 
realized idea of true heroism. That felicity, that 
pride, that help, is ours. Our past — both its great 
eras, that of settlement and that of independence — 
should announce, should compel, should spontane- 
ously evolve as from a germ, a wise, moral, and glo- 
rious future. These heroic men and women should 
not look down on a dwindled posterity. It should 
seem to be almost of course, too easy to be glorious, 
that they who keep the graves, bear the name, and 
boast the blood, of men in whom the loftiest sense 
of duty blended itself with the fiercest spirit of lib- 
erty, should add to their freedom, justice ; justice to 
all men, to all nations ; justice, that venerable virtue, 
without Avhich freedom, valor, and power, are but 
vulgar things. 

And yet is the past nothing, even our past, but as 
you, quickened by its examples, instructed by its 
experience, warned by its voices, assisted by its ac- 
cumulated instramentality, shall reproduce it in the 



\ 



THE HEROIC PERIOD OF OUR HISTORY. 105 

life of to-day. Its once busy existence, various sen- 
sations, fiery trials, dear-bought triumphs ; its dy- 
nasty of heroes, all its pulses of joy and anguish, and 
hope and fear, and love and praise, are with the 
years beyond the flood. " The sleeping and the dead 
are but as pictures." Yet, gazing on these, long and 
intently and often, we may pass into the likeness of 
the departed, — may emulate their labors, and par- 
take of their immortality. 



106 TUE POWER OF A STATE 



THE POWER OF A STATE DEVELOPED BY 
MENTAL CULTURE: 

A LECTUEE DELIVEKED BEFORE THE MEECANTILE LIBRARY 
ASSOCIATION, NOVEMBER IS, 184i. 



The transition from the scenes which have been 
passing before us for the last few months, to such a 
spectacle as this, is so sudden, so delightful, that I 
can scarcely refrain, as I cast my eyes over this com- 
posed and cultivated assembly, from exclaiming, 
" Hail, holy light ! " The clamor, tumult, and stimu- 
lations which attend that great trial and great task 
of liberty through which we have just gone, — a na- 
tion's choice of its ruler, — those vast gatherings of 
the people, — not quite in their original and ultimate 
sovereignty above or without the law, but in mass 
and bodily numbers without number ; processions 
without end, — by daylight and torchlight — under 
the law ; the stormy wave of the multitude rising 
and falling to the eloquence of liberty, — if it were 
eloquence at all ; the hope, the fear, the anxious care, 
the good news waited for and not coming, the bad 
news riding somewhere about a couple of hundred 
miles in advance of the express of either side ; the 
cheers of your co-workers ; the hissings and groanings, 
not to be uttered, of your opponents, — all are passed 
away as dreams. We find ourselves collected with- 



DEVELOPED BY MENTAL CULTURE. 107 

out distinction of party, without memory of party, in 
the security and confidence of reconciliation, or at least 
of truce, in the still air, — upon the green and neutral 
ground of thoughts and studies common and grateful 
to us all. To look backward brings to mind what 
Lenox says to Macbeth in the morning, before he had 
heard of the murder of the king. 

" The niglit has been unruly ; wliere we lay 
Our chimneys were blown down, and as they say 
Lamentings heard in the air, 
And prophesyings, with accents terrible, 
Of dire combustion and confused events 
New-hatched to the woful time ! " 

The night has passed, and the morning of an event- 
ful day is risen. So much we know ; and it is all we 
know. 

Delightful, in some sense, as I feel this change of 
scene, of society, and of influences to be, I found 
myself unable and unwilling, in the selection of a 
topic for the hour of this meeting, altogether to for- 
get the occasion to which I have referred. I have 
rather desired to see if we might not all, without dis- 
tinction of party, (for of the existence of party we 
know nothing here,) — if we might not all, the winner 
and the loser — contrive to learn some useful lesson 
from the occasion. All that happens in the world of 
Nature or Man, — every war ; every peace ; every 
hour of prosperity ; every hour of adversity ; every 
election ; every death ; every life ; every success and 
every failure, — all change, — all permanence, — the 
perished leaf; the unutterable glory of stars, — all 
things speak truth to the thoughtful spirit. 

"List ever, then, to the words of Wisdom, whether 
she speaketh to the soul in the full chords of revela- 



108 THE POWER OF A STATE 

tion, in the teaching of earth or air or sky, or in the 
still melodies of thought!" 

I wonder, then, if during the labors and excitations 
of the late election, and in the contemplation of 
possible results near and far forward, the inquiry has 
not occurred to you, as to me it has a thousand times, 
is there no way, are there no expedients by which 
such a State as Massachusetts, for example, may re- 
main in the Union, performing the duties, partaking 
as far as may be of the good of Union, and yet be in 
some greater degree than now she is independent of 
and unaffected by the administrative and legislative 
polic}^ of Union ? Is there no way to secure to our- 
selves a more steady, sure, progressive prosperity, — 
such a prosperity in larger measure than we are apt 
to imagine, — whatever national politics come upper- 
most ? Is there no way to sink the springs of our 
growth and greatness so deep, that the want of a 
little rain or a little dew, a little too much sunshine 
or too much shade from Washington, shall not neces- 
sarily cut off " the herd from the stalls " and cause 
the "fields to yield no meat"? Must it be, that 
because the great central regions, the valley of the 
Mississippi, the undefined and expanding South-west, 
have attracted to themselves the numerical suprem- 
acy — that our day is done? Is our voice, once 

** Their liveliest pledge 
Of hope in fears and dangers, heard so oft 
In Avorst extremes, and on the perilous edge 
Of battle when it raged in all assaults 
Their surest signal," — 

is that voice to be heard no more ? Have we de- 
clined, must we decline, into the condition of a 



DEVELOPED BY MENTAL CULTURE. 109 

province — doomed to await passively the edict of a 
distant palace, which shall cause it to thrive to-day 
and pine to-morrow ; now raise it to a gaudy and 
false prosperity, and then press " its beaming forehead 
to the dust"? Or is there a way by which we j^et 
ma}^ be, and for ever may be, the arbiters of our own 
fortunes ; may yet be felt in the counsels of America ; 
may yet help to command a national policy which we 
approve, or at least to bear unharmed a national pol- 
icy which w^e condemn ? Must we pale and fade and 
be dissolved in the superior rays of the great con- 
stellation, or yet "flame in the forehead of the morn- 
ing sky " with something of the brightness of our 
rising ? 

I take it for granted in all such speculations, in all 
such moods as this, that we are to remain in the 
Federal Union. With our sisters of the Republic we 
would live — we would die — 

" One hope, one lot, one life, one glory." 

I agree, too, that whatever we may do for Massa- 
chusetts, the influence of national politics upon our 
local prosperity must always be inappreciably great 
for evil or for good. 

It is of individuals, not States, that Goldsmith 
exclaims, 

" How small, of all that human hearts endure, 
That part which kings or laws can cause or cure ! " 

The joy and sorrow, the greatness and decline, of 
nations, are to a vast extent the precise work of kings 
or laws ; and although in our system every State has 
its own government and its own civil polity, to which 
important functions are assigned, yet wdien you con- 



110 THE POWER OF A STATE 

sider that it is to the great central power that war, 
peace, diplomacy, finance, our whole intercourse with 
the world, trade, as far as winds blow or waters roll, 
the trust of our glory, the protection of our labor, 
are confided, — nobody can indulge the dream that a 
State may remain in the Union at all, and yet be 
insensible of the good and evil, the wisdom or the 
folly, the honor and the shame, of its successive 
administrations. 

And yet I think that the statesmen of Massachu- 
setts may well ask themselves, whether there are no 
expedients of empire or imperial arts worthy her, — 
worthy them, — by which they may enable her either 
to retain consideration and lead in the general gov- 
ernment, to be conspicuous and influence an Ameri- 
can opinion, by which they may enable her either to 
extort what she calls good policy, — or else to break 
the force of what she calls occasional bad policy, 
which she cannot hinder and to which she must 
submit. 

Passing over all other expedients as unsuitable to 
the character and relations of this assemblj', is it not 
worth while to consider this matter, for example, — 
whether a higher degree of general mental culture, a 
more thorough exercising and accomplishing of the 
whole mass of our popular and higher mind, more 
knowledge, a wider diffusion of knowledge, loftier 
attainments in useful and in graceful knowledge than 
we have ever reached, or that any State has reached, 
might not help us to meet the enlarging demand of 
time, and the successive crises of the commonwealth? 
Is it certain that in our speculations on the causes of 
the grandeur and decay, of the wealth and the pov- 



DEVELOPED BY MENTAL CULTURE. Ill 

erty, the importance and the insignificance, of States, 
we have given qnite as high a place as it deserves to 
the intellect of the State ? Have we not thought too 
much of capacious harbors or teeming inland, navi- 
gable rivers, fleets of merchant ships and men-of-war, 
fields of wheat, plantations of cotton and rice and 
suear, too much of tariffs and drawbacks and banks, 
and too little, too little, of that soul, by which only, 
the nation shall be great and free ? In our specula- 
tions on knowledge and the bettering of the mind, is 
it rio'ht or is it wise to treat them as useful or as 
ornamental individual accomplishments alone, and 
not sometimes also to think of them as mines of 
national riches wealthier than Ormus or Ind, as 
perennial and salient springs of national power, as 
foundations, laid far below earthquake or frost, of a 
towering and durable public greatness? After all, 
this is the thought I would present to you, — is there 
a surer way of achieving the boast of Themistocles, 
that he knew how to make a small State a great one, 
than by making it wise, bright, knowing, apprehen- 
sive, quick-witted, ingenious, thoughtful; by com- 
municating to the whole mass of its people the 
highest degree of the most improved kind of educa- 
tion in its largest sense, which is compatible with the 
system of practical things; by beginning at the 
cradle, by touching the infant lip with fire from 
heaven ; by perfecting the methods of the free 
schools, and of all schools, so that the universal 
understanding shall be opened, kindled, guided at 
its very birth, and set forward, without the loss of a 
day, on the true path of intellectual life ; by taking 
care that all the food of which the soul of the people 



112 THE POWER OF A STATE 

eats shall be wholesome and nutritious, — that the 
books and papers which they read, the sermons and 
speeches which they hear, shall possess at least a 
predominance of truth, fact, honesty, of right and 
higli thought, just and graceful feeling; by providing 
institutions to guide the mature mind to the heights 
of knowledge ; by collections of art and taste that 
shall unfold and instruct the love of beauty; by 
planting betimes the gardens of a divine philosophy, 
and spreading out the pavilion of the Muses ? 

Let us think a little of mental culture as the true 
local policy of Massachusetts. 

I do not propose to repeat any thing quite so gen- 
eral and elementary as that easy commonplace which 
my Lord Bacon has illustrated so fondly and so gor- 
geously, that learned States have been usually pros- 
perous States, that the eras of lettered glory have 
been eras of martial and civil glory too, that an in- 
structed people has been for the most part a rich, 
laborious, energetic, and powerful people. The his- 
torical fact is undoubtedly as he records it ; and it is 
as encouraging as it is true. I wish to unfold the 
operations and uses of learning and culture in a little 
more detail, and with a more confined and local refer- 
ence to the case before us. Mental culture, as the 
true local policy of Massachusetts, I have said, is the 
topic to which I am restricted. 

Let me say, however, in the first place, generally, 
that mental culture should contribute to our power 
and our consideration, by communicating or by de- 
veloping those traits of character that lie at the 
foundation of all splendid and remarkable national 
distinction. All the greatness which is recorded in 



DEVELOPED BY MENTAL CULTURE. 113 

the histories or the epics of all the great States of the 
earth, all the long series of their virtues, all their 
comjDass of policy, all their successful contention Avith 
nature or with man, all their great works well per- 
formed, all their great clangers bravely met, all the 
great perils which harass them resisted and scattered, 
all their industrial renown, their agriculture, their 
trade, their art, their science, their libraries, their 
architecture, all their contributions to thought, to 
humanity, to progress, all the charm that attaches to 
their living name and that lingers on the capacious 
tomb into which at last they go down, — all this you 
trace at length to a few energetic qualities of mind 
and character. It does not spring from any fortuitous 
concurrence of any quantity of mere material atoms ; 
it is not the growth of any number of hundred years 
of rain and sunshine falling upon the surface of the 
earth ; it is not a spontaneous or necessary develop- 
ment and manifestation according to some mechanical 
and organic laws ; — it is a production of the human 
mind; it is a creation of the human will ; it is just 
the nobler and larger parts of man, in their most 
appropriate and grandest exemplifications. All of 
it rests at last on enterprise, energy, curiosity, perse- 
verance, fancy, talent, — loftily directed, heroically 
directed. A few simple, commanding traits, a digni- 
fied aim, a high conception of the true glory of a 
State, — with a little land and water to work with, — 
and you have a great nation. I approve, therefore, 
of these expressions : the Roman mind, the Grecian 
mind, the Oriental mind, the European mind. There 
is true philosophy and an accurate history in them. 
They penetrate to the true criteria which distinguish 

8 



114 THE POWER OF A STATE 

races, — the mental criteria. It is not her " plumed 
and jewelled turban," her tea-plant and her cinnamon- 
plant, her caves, temj)les, and groves of palms, her 
exhaustless fertility of soils, her accumulations of 
imperial treasures, — " barbaric pearl and gold," 
as in a dream of the Arabian Nights, — by which I 
recognize the primeval East ; it is that universal 
childhood of reason, — not a da}^ older than in the 
age of Sardanapalus or of Ninus, — that subjugated 
popuhir character bowed to the earth beneath the 
superincumbent despotism of ages, that levity and 
vanity and effeminacy of the privileged few, the 
elaborate luxury in which their lives are steeped, 
their poetry of the fancy, their long contemplations 
on nature and divinity, on which the whole intellect 
of the East might brood for six thousand years and 
not bring away as much truth as is taught in six 
months to the oldest boys and girls in our high 
schools, — these are the true characteristics of Asia ; 
these it is which solve all the facts of her history ; 
these it is which, put into action, are her history 
itself. And then passing westward to Athens, — to 
Attica, — is it her area, not quite so large, not half 
as fertile, as our own Rhode Island, her mountain 
steeps sprinkled with dwarf oaks and fir trees, her 
sun-burnt valleys covered with meagre herbage, her 
wintry torrents dried up in summer, her olive trees 
with their pale leaf and pliable branches, — is it these 
things which seem to you to have made up the grace 
of Greece, or was it that flexible, brave, and energetic 
character, so prompt and full of resource, that curi- 
osity and perseverance and fire, that love of Athens 
and of glory, that sub til ty of practical understanding, 



DEVELOPED BY MENTAL CULTURE. 115 

that unrivalled elegance of taste, that teeming and 
beautiful fancy, — were not these the traits, and 
these the gifts which created the Athens of the 
world and of all ages, — the one and only Athens ; 
which are embodied for us in the Iliad and in the 
QEdipus and in the Parthenon, in the treatises of 
Aristotle, the dialogues of Plato, the orations of 
Demosthenes, — that eloquence of an expiring na- 
tion ; which stand out on the sculptured page of 
Plutarch in the port of a hundred demi-gods ; which 
created her to be a teacher of patriotism and a light to 
liberty ; which won for her in her own time the place 
of the first power of the world, and seated her with 
a more rare felicity on an intellectual throne, from 
which no progress of the species may cast her down ? 

Now, if the nations differ by their minds, the right 
kind and the right degree of mental culture goes to 
the very springs of the national nature. It applies 
itself directly to the causa causans. It imparts and 
it shapes that basis of qualities, good or bad, large or 
little, stone or wood, or hay or stubble, — on which 
the State ascends to its duration of a day, or its dura- 
tion of ages. 
I I do not say that mental culture alone can com- 
pletely educate a nation, — far from it. There must 
be action. There must be labor. There must be 
difficulty. There must be the baptism of blood and 
of fire. If there is a not very fertile soil under foot, 
a not very spicy air around, a not very luxurious 
heaven overhead, — it is all the better. 

Nor is it every kind and every degree of mental 
culture that will do this work. It must be such 
culture as may be given to an employed, a grave, an 



116 THE POWER OF A STATE 

earnest, a moral, and a free people. It must be a 
culture of the reason and of the heart. It must not 
be a culture like that which consoled the Paris of 
Louis XIV., wliich consoles the Rome, the Florence, 
and the Venice of our time for the loss, for the want, 
of liberty. It must not be a culture which supplies 
trifles to the eye, stimulations to the senses, shows to 
the fancy, the music of a holiday to the ear. It must 
not be a culture which turns mortal life, that solemn 
and that grand reality and waking, into a fine dream, 

— and presents death, not as an interruption of pro- 
found attachments, earnest labors, and serious aims, 

— but as a drooping of the garlands of a feast from 
which the guests have departed. It must be a very 
different kind of mental culture from this. It must be 
one which shall be so directed as to give force, power, 
depth, effectiveness, to the intellect of the whole 
people. It must be one which, beginning with the 
youngest child, shall seek to improve the heart of the 
people, shall propose to the infant and to the adoles- 
cent will and sensibilities great examples, as well as 
wholesome counsel, — the careers of nations and of 
men — pure, rapid, and majestic, as rivers — grand, 
swelling sentiments of liberty, patriotism, duty, and 
honor, — triumphant, awful, splendid deaths, — the 
Puritan at the stake, tlie patriot on the scaffold, those 
who fell at Thermopylae in obedience to the law, 
those who were buried at Plymouth in the first, 
awful winter. Such a culture as this it is, which, 
blending with the other discipline of public and pri- 
vate life, may prove the mother and nurse of a great, 
thoughtful, and free people. '^ Remember that the 
learning of the few is despotism ; the learning of the 



DEVELOPED BY MENTAL CULTURE. 117 

multitude is liberty ; — and that intelligent and 
principled liberty is fame, wisdom, and power." 

In the next place, to come down to a little more 
detail, mental culture may contribute to our security, 
our independence, our local aggrandizement, by in- 
forming and directing our labor. 

I need not tell you that labor is the condition — I 
will not say, of our greatness, but — of our being. 
What were Massachusetts without it? Lying away 
up under the North star, — our winters long and 
cold, our springs backward and capricious, our sky 
ungenial, our coast iron-bound, — our soil not over- 
productive, barren almost altogether of the great 
staples of commerce which adorn and enrich the 
wheat-fields of the central regions, the ocean prai- 
ries of the West, the rice-grounds and sugar and 
cotton plantations of the South, — our area small, — 
our numbers few, — our earlier occupations of navi- 
gation and fishing divided with us by a whole world 
at peace, — what is therefor us but labor, — labor 
imjyrohus^ labor omnia vincens ? And what kind of 
labor is it which is to vanquish the antagonist powers 
of nature, and build the palace of a commodious and 
conspicuous national life over against these granite 
mountains and this unfruitful sea? Is it one kind, 
or two ; or is it the whole vast and various labor of 
intellectual civilization, — not agriculture only and 
trade and fishing, but the whole family of robust and 
manly arts, which furnish occupation to everybody 
every moment of working time, — occupation, to 
every taste and talent and faculty, that which it 
likes best, that which improves it most, that which 
it can do easiest, — occupation for the strong and 



118 THE POWER OF A STATE 

the weak, the bright and the dull, the 3^onng and the 
old, and both the sexes, — occupation for winter and 
summer, daylight and lamplight, cold weather and 
warm, wet and dry, — occupation that shall, with 
more than magnetic touch, seize on, develop, disci- 
pline, and perfect every capacity, the whole mass of 
ability, gathering up all fragments of mind and of 
time, so that nothing be lost, — is not this the labor 
by which we are to grow great ? Is not this the 
labor which is to be to us in the place of mines, of 
pearls, of vineyards, of cinnamon gardens, of enam- 
elled prairies, of wheat-fields, of rice-grounds and 
cotton-fields and sugar-plantations tilled by the 
hands of slaves? This is that transmuting power 
without wdiich we are poor, give what they will — 
with it rich, take what they will away ! This it is, 
labor, ever labor, which, on the land, on the sea, in 
the fields, in all its applications, with all its helps, 
from the straw bonnet braided or plaited by the 
fingers, up to those vast processes in which, evoking 
to its aid the powers of nature and the contrivances 
of ages of skill, it takes the shapeless ore from its 
bed, the fleece from the felt, the cotton from the 
pod, and moulds them into shapes of beauty and 
use and taste, — the clothing, the armor, the furni- 
ture of civilization, sought for in all the markets of 
the world, — this it is which is to enrich and decorate 
this unlovely nature where our lot is cast, and fit it 
for the home of cultivated man ! 

Now, if the highest practicable degree of mental 
culture and useful knowledge is really the best 
instrumentality for instructing, guiding, vivifying, 
helping this rough power of labor, — if it will sup- 



DEVELOPED BY MENTAL CULTURE. 119 

ply the chemistry which teaches it how to enrich 
barren soils, reclaim and spare exhausted soils, irri- 
gate parched soils, make two blades of grass grow 
where one grew before, — if it will teach it how to 
build tunnels through mountains or beneath beds 
of rivers and under populous towns, how to fill or 
bridge the valley, how to stretch out and fasten in 
their places those long lines of iron roads which, as 
mighty rivers, pour the whole vast inland into a 
market of exchange for what trade has gathered 
from every quarter of the globe, — if it will teach 
it better how to plan its voyages and make its pur- 
chases, so as most seasonably to meet the various 
and sudden and changing demands of men by the 
adequate supply, — if it can teach it how to con- 
struct its tools, how to improve old ones and invent 
new, how to use them, by what shortest and simplest 
and cheapest process it can arrive at the largest re- 
sults of production, — if it can thus instruct and 
thus aid that labor, which is our only source of 
wealth, and of all material greatness, — if, above 
all, when rightly guided by the morality and religion 
which I assume ever3'where to preside over our edu- 
cation, it communicates that moral and prudential 
character which is as needful and as available for 
thrift as for virtue, thoughtfulness, economy, self- 
estimation, sobriety, respect for others' rights, — is 
it not an obvious local and industrial policy to pro- 
mote, diffuse, and perfect it ? 

Well, I must not spend a moment in the proof of 
a proposition so palpable as this. I say there is not 
an occupation of civilized life, from the making of 
laws and poems and histories, down to the opening 



120 THE POWER OF A STATE 

of New Jersey oj^sters with a broken jack-knife, 
that is not better done by a bright than a dull man, 
by a quick than a slow mind, by an instructed man 
than a gross or simple man, by a prudent, thought- 
ful, and careful man, than by a light and foolish one. 
Every one of these occupations — in other words, 
the universal labor of civilization — involves, de- 
mands, is, a mental effort, putting forth a physical 
effort ; and you do but only go to the fountain-head, 
as you ought to do, when you seek, by an improved 
culture and a better knowledge, to give force and 
power to the imperial capacity behind, and to set a 
thoughtful and j)rudent spirit to urge and to guide 
it. You say that you bestow a new power on man, 
when you give him an improved machine. Do you 
not bestow a more available gift, when you bestow 
on him an improvement of that mental and moral 
nature which makes, improves, and uses, profitably 
or unprofitably , all machines ? In one case, you give 
him a limited and definite amount of coined money, 
in the other a mine of gold or silver. Nay, what 
avails the improved machine to the untaught mind ? 
Put a fortj'-feet telescope, with its mirrors of four 
feet diameter, into the hands of a savage, whether 
in civilized or Indian life, and he sees about as much 
as our children see through a glass prism, — gaudy 
outlines, purple and orange and green crossing and 
blending on every thing. Let the exercised mind of 
Herschel lift that same tube from the Cape of Hope 
toward the southern sky, and the architecture of 
the heaveus — not made with hands — ascends be- 
fore him, — 

" Glory beyond all glory ever seen 
By waking sense, or by the dreaming soul I " 



DEVELOPED BY MENTAL CULTURE. 121 

firmaments of fixed stars, — of which all the stars in 
our heaven, all our eye takes in, form but one firma- 
ment, one constellation only of a universe of con- 
stellations, separated by unsounded abysses, yet 
holden together by invisible bands, — moving to- 
gether, perhaps, about some centre, to which the 
emancipated soul may in some stage of being as- 
cend, but which earthly science shall vanish away 
without seeing ! 

Such in kind, not of course in degree, is the addi- 
tional power you give to labor by improving the 
intellectual and prudential character which informs 
and guides it. 

It is within the knowledge of you all that Mr. 
Mann, in one of those reports to the Board of Edu- 
cation to which the community is so much indebted, 
I believe the fifth, has developed this thought with 
that keenness of analvsis and clearness and force 
of expression for which he is remarkable. You will 
be particularly struck with the proofs which he has 
there collected from several most intelligent and 
respectable superintendents or proprietors of manu- 
facturing establishments, showing by precise statisti- 
cal details, derived from a long course of personal 
observation, that throughout the whole range of 
mechanical industry the well educated operative 
does more work, does it better, wastes less, uses 
his allotted portion of machinery to more advan- 
tage and more profit, earns more money, commands 
more confidence, rises faster, rises higher, from the 
lower to the more advanced positions of his employ- 
ments, than the uneducated operative. And now, 
how interestingly and directly this fact connects 



122 THE POWER OF A STATE 

itself with my subject, I need not pause to show. 
You speak of tariffs to protect your industry from 
the redundant capital, the pauper labor, the matured 
skill, the aggressive and fitful policy, of other na- 
tions. You cannot lay a tariff under the Constitu- 
tion, and you cannot compel Congress to do so ; but 
you can try to rear a class of working-men who may 
help you to do something without one. You speak 
of specific duties, and discriminating duties, and 
what not ! Are you sure that if everybody, — every 
mind^ I should say, — which turns a wheel or makes 
a pin in this great workshop of ours, all full from 
basement to attic with the various hum of free 
labor, was educated up to the utmost degree com- 
patible with his place in life, — that this alone 
would not be equal to at least a uniform duty of 
about twenty-eight per cent, ad valorem, all on the 
home value? You must have more skill you say, 
more skill than now, or you must have govern- 
mental protection. Very well ; go to work to make 
it, then. You manufacture almost every thing. Sup- 
pose you go into the manufacture of skill. Try 
your hand at the skill business. Skill in the arts is 
mental power exercised in arts, that is all. Begin 
by making mental power. You can do that as easily 
as you can make satinets or fustian or chain-cable. 
You have a great deal of money. The world never 
saw such a provision for popular and higher educa- 
tion as you could make in a year in Massachusetts, 
and not feel it. Consider how true and fine in tliis 
application would the words of the charitable man's 
epitaph be : " What I spent I had. What I kept I 
lost. What I gave away remains with me ! " 



I 
1 



DEVELOPED BY MENTAL CULTURE. 123 

By what precise course of instruction, elementary 
and advanced, by what happier methods, by what easier 
access to the mind and heart, by " what drugs, what 
charms, what conjuration, and what mighty magic," 
this heightened mental ability and accomplishment 
may be achieved, which I know is practicable, and 
which I know is power, — it is not within my plan, if 
I could, to suggest. I may be permitted to remem- 
ber, that the first time I ever ventured to open my 
lips in a deliberative body, I had the honor to support 
a bill in the House of Representatives, in Massa- 
chusetts, providing for educating teachers of common 
schools. I should be perfectly willing to open them 
for the last time, in the same place, in support of the 
same proposition exactly. I can conceive of a body 
of teachers, — I know individuals now, — who would 
do this great woi'k for Massachusetts, as patriotism 
and religion would wish it done, — who would take 
the infant capacity of the people, as it came to life, 
into their arms, and breathe into it the quicken- 
ing breath, — who receiving it, bathed and blessed 
by a mother's love, would apply to it, instead of 
stripes, the gentle, irresistible magnet of scientific 
instruction, opening it as a flower to light and rain, — 
who, when the intellectual appetite was begun to be 
developed, would feed it with the angels' food of the 
best mental and moral culture which years of reflec- 
tion and experience and interchange of thought could 
suggest, — would carry forward the heart and the 
reason together, — would fit the whole bright tribe of 
childhood as completely, in so far as intellect and 
acquisition are concerned, for beginning to wrestle 
with the practical realities of life at fourteen, as now 
at one-and-twenty. 



124 THE POWER OF A STATE 

To such teachers I leave details, with one sugges- 
tion only, — that I would not take the Bible from the 
schools so long as a particle of Plymouth Rock was 
left, large enough to make a gun-flint of, or as long 
as its dust floated in the air. I would have it read 
not only for its authoritative revelations, and its com- 
mands and exactions, obligatory yesterday, to-day, and 
for ever, but for its English, for its literature, for its 
pathos, for its dim imagery, its sayings of consolation 
and wisdom and universal truth, — achieving how 
much more than the effect which Milton ascribes to 
music : 

"Nor wanting power to mitigate and swage, 
Witli solemn touches, troubled thoughts, and chase 
Anguish and doubt and fear and sorrow and pain 
From mortal, or immortal minds." 

Perhaps as striking an illustration on a large scale 
as could be desired, of the connection between the 
best directed and most skilful labor and the most 
cultivated and most powerful intellect, is afforded by 
the case of England. British industry, as a whole, is 
among the most splendid and extraordinary things in 
the history of man. When you consider how small 
•a work -bench it has to occupy altogether, — a little 
stormy island bathed in almost perpetual fogs, with- 
out silk, or cotton, or vineyards, or sunshine ; and 
then look at that acfriculture so scientific and so 
rewarded, that vast net-work of internal intercom- 
munication, the docks, merchant-ships, men-of-war, 
the trade encompassing the globe, the flag on which 
the sun never sets, — when you look above all at that 
vast bod}^ of useful and manly art, — not directed 
like the industry of France — the industry of vanity 



DEVELOPED BY MENTAL CULTURE. 125 

— to making pier-glasses and air-balloons and gol^elin 
tapestry and mirrors, to arranging processions and 
chiselling silver and twisting gold into filigrees, — 
but to clothing the people, to the manufacture of 
woollen, cotton, and linen cloth, of railroads and 
chain-cables and canals and anchors and achromatic 
telescopes, and chronometers to heep the time at 
sea, — when you think of the vast aggregate mass of 
their manufacturing and mechanical production, which 
no statistics can express, and to find a market for 
which she is planting colonies under every constel- 
lation, and by intimidation, by diplomacy, is knocking 
at the door of every market-house upon the earth, — 
it is really difficult to restrain our admiration of such 
a display of energy, labor, and genius, winning 
bloodless and innocent triumphs everywhere, giving 
to the age we live in the name of the age of the in- 
dustry of the j)eople. Now, the striking and the 
instructive fact is, that exactly in that island work- 
shop, by this very race of artisans, of coal-heavers 
and woollen manufacturers, of machinists and black- 
smiths and ship-carpenters, there has been produced 
and embodied for ever, in words that will outlast 
the mountains as well as the Pyramids, a literature 
which, take it for all in all, is the richest, most pro- 
found, most instructive, combining more spirituality 
with more common sense, springing from more capa- 
cious souls, conveying a better wisdom, more con- 
formable to the truth in man, in nature, and in human 
life, than the literature of any nation that ever existed. 
That same race, side by side with the unparalleled 
growth of its industry, produces Shakspeare, Milton, 
Bacon, and Newton, all four at the summit of human 



126 THE POWER OF A STATE 

thought, — and then, just below these unapproachable 
fixed lights, a whole firmament of glories, lesser than 
the}', as all created intelligence must be, yet in whose 
superior rays the age of Augustus, of Leo X., of 
Louis XIV., all but the age of Pericles, the culture 
of Greece, pale and fade. And yet the literature of 
England is not the only, scarcely the most splendid, 
fruit or form of the mental power and the energetic 
character of England. That same race, along with 
their industry, along with their literature, has built 
up a jurisprudence which is for substance our law 
to-day, — has constructed the largest mercantile and 
war navy, and the largest commercial empire with its 
pillars encircling the globe, that men ever saw, — has 
gained greater victories on sea and land than any 
power in the world, — has erected the smallest spot 
to the most imperial ascendency recorded in history. 
The administrative triumphs of her intellect are as 
conspicuous as her imaginative and her speculative 
triumphs. 

Such is mental power. Mark its union with labor 
and with all greatness ; deduce the law ; learn the 
lesson ; see how you, too, may grow great. Such an 
industry as that of England demanded such an 
intellect as that of England. Sic vohis etiam itur ad 
astra ! That way to you, also, glory lies ! 

I have now been speaking of a way in which mental 
culture may help your labor to grow independent of 
governmental policy, and thus to disregard and en- 
dure what you cannot control. But may not the 
same great agent do more than this ? May it not, 
not merely enable you to bear an administrative pol- 
icy which you cannot prevent, but enable you to 



DEVELOPED BY MENTAL CULTURE. 127 

return the more grateful power of influencing na- 
tional councils and national policy, long after the 
numerical control has gone to dwell in the imperial 
valley of the West? 

T will not pause to sa}^ so obvious a thing, as that 
those you call public men, those whom you send to 
urge your claims and consult jouv interests in the 
national assembly, are better fitted for their task by 
profound and liberal studies. This were too obvious 
a thought ; and yet I cannot help holding up to your 
notice a very splendid exemplification of this, in that 
" old man eloquent," who counts himself to have 
risen from the Presidency to represent the people in 
the House of Representatives. See there what the 
most universal acquisitions will do for the most power- 
ful talents. How those vast accumulations of learning 
are fused, moulded, and projected, b}^ the fiery tide 
of mind ! How that capacious memory, realizing 
half the marvels of Pascal and of Cicero, yields up 
in a moment the hived wisdom of a life of study and 
a life of action, — the happiest word, the aptest 
literary illustration, the exact detail, the precise 
rhetorical instrument the case demands, — how it 
yields all up instantly to the stimulated, fervid, un- 
quenchable faculties! How little of dilettanteism 
and parade, and vagueness of phrase and mysticism 
of idea ; how clear, available, practicable, direct, 
— one immense torrent, rushing as an arrow, all 
the way from the perennial source to the hundred 
mouths ! 

If mental culture did nothing for you but send 
such men to consult on your welfare in the councils 
of the nation, it would do much to preserve your 



128 THE POWER OF A STATE 

political ascendency. But look at this matter a little 
more largely. Suppose that by succession of effort, 
by stud}-, by time, you could really carry up the lite- 
rary character of Massachusetts to as high a degree 
of superiorit}- to the general literary character of these 
States, as that of Attica compared with the other 
States of Greece in the age after the Persian war ; 
suppose the school-boy boast could be achieved, and 
3^ou were the Athens of America ; suppose the libra- 
ries, the schools, the teachers, the scholars, were here, 
the galleries of art, the subtle thinkers, the weavers 
of systems, the laurelled brow, "the vision and the 
faculty divine ; " suppose the whole body of our 
written productions, from newspapers upwards or 
downwards, had obtained a recognized superiority 
over those of any other region, were purer, better 
expressed, more artist-like, of wider compass ; sup- 
pose that the general taste of the world and the 
nation should authenticate and settle all this, — 
would it or Avould it not profit you as an instrument 
of political ascendency ? It would be soothing to our 
pride, certainly. Perhaps that would not be all. 
Knowledge is power as well as fame. You could 
not, perhaps, hold the lettered and moral relation to 
America which I have sketched — it is, alas ! a sketch 
— without holding a political relation in some degree 
of correspondence with it. Think of that subtle, 
all-embracing, plastic, mysterious, irresistible thing 
called public opinion, the god of this lower world, and 
consider wliat a State, or a cluster of States, of marked 
and acknowledged literary and intellectual lead, might 
do to color and shape that opinion to their will. 
Consider how winged are words, how electrical, light- 



DEVELOPED BY MENTAL CULTURE. 129 

like the speed of thought, how awful human sym- 
pathy. Consider how soon a wise, a beautiful thought 
uttered here, — a sentiment of liberty perhaps, or 
word of succor to the oppressed, of exhortations to 
duty, to patriotism, to glory, the refutation of a 
sophism, the unfolding of a truth for which the nation 
maybe better, — how soon a word fitly or w^isely 
spoken here is read on the Upper Mississippi and 
beneath the orange-groves of Florida, all through the 
unequalled valley ; how vast an audience it gains, into 
how many bosoms it has access, on how much good 
soil the seed may rest and spring to life, how easily 
and fast the fine spirit of truth and beauty goes all 
abroad upon the face of the world. Consider that 
the meditations of a single closet, the pamj)hlet of 
a single writer, have inflamed or composed natious 
and armies, shaken thrones, determined the policy of 
governments for years of war or peace. Consider 
that the Drapier's Letters of Swift set Ireland on fire, 
cancelled the patent of George I., inspired or 
kept breathing the spirit which in a later day the 
eloquence of Grattan evoked to national life. Burke's 
Reflections on the French Revolution began that 
great contention of nations that lasted a quarter of a 
century, till the sun went down on the drenched field 
of Waterloo. The sarcasms of Voltaire had torn 
away its grandeur from the throne, and its sacredness 
from the kindred church, or popular violence might 
not have blown them both into the air. He who 
guides public opinion moves the hand that moves the 
world ! 

There is an influence which I would rather see 
Massachusetts exert on her sisters of this Union, 

9 



130 THE POWER OF A STATE 

than see her furnish a President every twelve years 
or command a majority on any division in Congress ; 
and that is such an influence as Athens exerted on 
the taste and opinion first of Greece, then of Rome, 
then of the universal modern world ; such as she 
will exert while the race of man exists. This, of all 
the kinds of empire, was most grateful and innocent 
and glorious and immortal. This was won by no 
bargain, by no fraud, by no war of the Peloponnesus, 
by the shedding of no human blood. It w^ould rest 
on admiration of the beautiful, the good, the true in 
art, in poetry, in thought ; and it would last while 
the emotions, its object, were left in a human soul. 
It would turn the eye of America hitherwards with 
love, gratitude, and tears, such as those with which 
we turn to the walk of Socrates beneath the plane- 
tree, now sere, the summer hour of Cicero, the prison 
into which philosophy descended to console the spirit 
of Boethius, that room through whose opened win- 
dow came into the ear of Scott, as he died, the mur- 
mur of the gentle Tweed, — love, gratitude, and 
tears, such as we all yield to those whose immortal 
wisdom, whose divine verse, whose -eloquence of 
heaven, whose scenes of many-colored life, have held 
up the show of things to the insatiate desires of the 
mind, have taught us how to live and how to die ! 
Herein were power, herein were influence, herein 
were security. Even in the madness of civil war it 
might survive for refuge and defence ! 

"Lift not tliy spear against the Muse's bower. 
The great Ematliian conqueror bid spare 
The house of Pindarus, when temple and tower 
Went to the ground And the repeated air 
Of sad Electra's poet liad tlie power 
To save the Atlienian walls from ruin bare." 



DEVELOPED BY MENTAL CULTURE. 131 

And DOW if any one, any child of Massachusetts, 
looking round him and forward, trying to cast the 
horoscope of his local fortunes, feels a sentiment of 
despondency upon his spirit, and thinks all this ex- 
hortcition to mental culture as a means of retaining: 
endangered or receding power to be but the dream 
of pedantry, and begins to think that if he would 
belong to a great State, an historical State, an ascen- 
dant State, he must be setting out toward the tran- 
quil sea, — to him I say, turn back to her origin, and 
be of thy unfilial fears ashamed ! Thou, a descend- 
ant of that ancestry of heroes, and already only in 
the two hundredth year, afraid that the State is dying 
out ! Do you forget that it took two hundred years 
of training in England, in Scotland, in Geneva, in 
the Netherlands, — two hundred years of persecu- 
tion, of life passed in exile and in chains, of death 
triumphing over fires, — to form out of the general 
mind of England these one hundred men and women, 
our fathers and mothers, who landed on the Rock, 
and do you think a plant so long in rearing has 
begun already to decay? 

It took a hundred and fifty years more, — one long 
war, one long labor, one long trial, one long sorrow, 
as we count sorrow, years of want and disease, of 
bereavements, of battle, of thought, of every heroical 
faculty tasked by every heroical labor, one long, 
varied, searching, tremendous educational process, 
just the process to evolve and mature these traits on 
which a commonwealth might repose for a thousand 
years of glory, — it took all this more to train them 
for the loftier sphere, the grander duties, the more 
imperial and historical renown, of independence and 



132 THE STATE AND MENTAL CULTURE. 

union ; and do you think that the energies of such 
a nature, so tempered and refined, are become ex- 
hausted in half a century ? Who believes in such an 
idle expenditure of preparation ? Why, that would 
be to hew out a throne of granite on the side of ever- 
lasting hills by the labor of generations, for one old 
king, the last of his line, to die on ! No ; be true to 
your origin and to yourselves, and dynasties shall fill 
by successive accessions the prepared and steadfast 
seat. 

Doubtless the Pilgrim race, — the Puritan race, — 
shall go everywhere, and possess largely of every 
thing. The free North-west, especially, will be 
theirs ; the skies of Ontario and Erie and iMichigan, 
the prairies of Illinois, the banks of the river of 
beauty, the mines of Wisconsin and Iowa, shall be 
theirs. But the old homestead, and the custody of 
the Rock, are in the family also. Nearest of all the 
children to the scenes of the fathers' earthly life, 
be it ours the longest and the most fondly to bear 
their names, and hold fast their virtues. Be it ours, 
especially, to purify, enrich, adorn this State, — our 
own, our native land, — our fathers' monument, — 
our fathers' praise ! 



THE AMERICAN BAR. 133 



THE POSITION AND FUNCTIONS OF THE AMERI- 
CAN BAR, AS AN ELEMENT OF CONSERVATISM 
IN THE STATE : 

AN ADDRESS DELIVERED BEFORE THE LAW SCHOOL IN 
CAMBRIDGE, JULY 3, 1845. 



The S23eaker, on one of the anniversaries observed 
by a literary association in this ancient university, 
congratulated himself, as he cast his eye over an 
audience of taste and learning, that in such company 
he could have no temptation to stray beyond the 
walls of the academy, or within the noise of the 
city and the forum. I have supposed that our way, 
on the contrary, lies directly into the city and the 
forum. I have assumed that in calling me to this 
duty you expected and designed that I should con- 
sider some topic of a strictly professional interest. 
All the objects and proprieties of the hour require 
me to do so. It is a seminary of the law, to which 
the day is set apart. It is to students of the law, 
assembled in the presence of teachers of the law, — 
your masters and my own, — and composing with 
them a school worthy to begin a new era of the 
enriched and various jurisprudence of America, — 
it is to the members of a profession, that I address 
myself, — all of you immersed in its intricate stud- 
ies, and fired by what Milton has called its " prudent 



134 CONSERVATIVE FORCE OF 

and heavenly contemplations." Some of von just 
going forth to attempt its practice, to do its hard 
work, to kindle with its excitations, to be agitated 
by its responsibilities, to sound its depths and shoals 
of honor, — and it is therefore of things professional 
that I seem to be commanded to speak. Doubtless, 
there is somewhat in the spirit of the place that 
might suggest the wish at least for matter more 
" airy and delicious." I will not deny that I never 
visit these scenes, so dear to learning, without a 
very vehement impulse to be disengaged for the 
day from all the idle business of the law and of 
life, — from litigious terms, fast contentions, and 
the dream of "flowing fees," — from facts sometimes 
without interest, and rules sometimes without sense, 
— to be disengaged from all this, and to abandon 
myself evermore to the vernal fancies and sensa- 
tions of your time of life, to the various banquet 
of general knowledge on which so many spirits have 
been fed, to all those fair ideals which once had 
power to touch and fill the heart. The sentiment is 
not very professional ; and yet it is not wholly un- 
countenanced by authority. You remember that it 
was the great Chancellor d'Aguesseau, who, full of 
fame as of years, at the very summit of the jurispru- 
dence of France, the most learned of her orators, the 
most eloquent of her lawyers, — in the confidence of 
a letter to his son, could confess that literature had 
always been to him a sort of mental debauch into 
which he perpetually and secretly relapsed. '' I was 
born," he said, " in the republic of elegant letters ; 
there I grew to be a man ; there I passed the hap- 
piest years of my life ; and to it I come back as a 



THE AMERICAN BAR. 135 

wanderer on sea revisits his native land." But these 
were the confessions of an illustrious reputation, 
which could afford to make them. Win his fame, 
attain his years, emulate his polished eloquence, do 
as much for the law of a free country as he did for 
that of the despotism of Louis XIV. and the regency, 
and you may make the same confession too. Mean- 
time, even here and to-day our theme, our aim, is 
the law. The literary influences and solicitations of 
the scene and hour we resist and expel. We put 
them, one and all, out of court. Academiam istam 
exoremus ut sileat ! 

There are reasons without number why we should 
love and honor our noble profession, and should be 
grateful for the necessity or felicity or accident which 
called us to its service. 

But of these there is one, I think, which, rightly 
apprehended, ought to be uppermost in every law- 
yer's mind, on which he cannot dwell too thought- 
fully and too anxiously; to which he should resort 
always to expand and erect his spirit and to keep him- 
self up, if I may say so, to the height of his calling ; 
from which he has a right to derive, in every moment 
of weariness or distaste or despondency — not an 
occasion of pride, but — ceaseless admonitions to 
duty and incentives to hope. And that reason is, 
that better than any other, or as well as any other 
position or business in the whole subordination of 
life, his profession enables him to serve the State. As 
well as any other, better than any other profession or 
business or sphere, more directly, more palpably, it 
enables and commands him to perform certain grand 
and difl&cult and indispensable duties of patriotism, 



136 CONSERVATIVE FORCE OF 

— certain grand, difficult, and indispensable duties 
to our endeared and common native land. 

Turning for the present, then, from other aspects 
of the profession, survey it under this. Certainly it 
presents no nobler aspect. It presents none so well 
adapted — I do not say, to make us vain of it, but — 
to make us fit for it, to make us equal to it, to put us 
on turning it to its utmost account, and working out 
its whole vast and various and highest utilities. It 
raises it from a mere calling by which bread, fame, 
and social place may be earned, to a function by 
which the republic may be served. It raises it from 
a dexterous art and a subtle and flexible science — 
from a cunning logic, a gilded rhetoric, and an ambi- 
tious learning, wearing the purple robe of the soph- 
ists, and letting itself to hire — to the dignity of 
almost a department of government, — an instru- 
mentality of the State for the well-being and conser- 
vation of the State. Consider then the position and 
functions of the American Bar in the Commonwealth. 

I make haste to say that it is not at all because the 
legal profession may be thought to be peculiarly 
adapted to fit a man for what is technically called 
'' public life," and to afford him a ready, too ready an 
introduction to it, — it is not on any such reason as 
this that I shall attempt to maintain the sentiment 
which I have advanced. It is not by enabling its 
members to leave it and become the members of a 
distinct profession, — it is not thus that in the view 
which I could wish to exhibit, it serves the State. 
It is not the jurist turned statesman whom I mean to 
hold up to you as useful to the republic, — although 
jurists turned statesmen have illustrated every page. 



THE AMERICAN BAR. 137 

every year of our annals, and have taught how admir- 
ably the school of the law can train the mind and 
heart for the service of constitutional liberty and the 
achievement of civil honor. It is not the jurist 
turned statesman ; it is the jurist as jurist ; it is the 
jurist remaining jurist ; it is the bench, the magis- 
tracy, the bar, — the profession as a profession, and 
in its professional character, — a class, a body, of 
which I mean exclusively to speak ; and my position 
is, that as such it holds, or may aspire to hold, a 
place, and performs a function of peculiar and vast 
usefulness in the American Commonwealth. 

Let me premise, too, that instead of diffusing my- 
self in a display of all the modes by which the pro- 
fession of the law may claim to serve the State, I 
shall consider but a single one, and that is its agency 
as an element of conservation. The position and 
functions of the American Bar, then, as an element 
of conservation in the State, — this precisely and 
singly is the topic to which I invite your attention. 

And is not the profession such an element of con- 
servation? Is not this its characteristical office and 
its appropriate praise ? Is it not so that in its nature, 
in its functions, in the intellectual and practical 
habits which it forms, in the opinions to which it 
conducts, in all its tendencies and influences of spec- 
ulation and action, it is and ought to be profession- 
ally and peculiarly such an element and such an 
agent, — that it contributes, or ought to be held to 
contribute, more than all things else, or as much as 
any thing else, to preserve our organic forms, our 
civil and social order, our public and private justice, 
our constitutions of government, — even the Union 



138 CONSERVATIVE FORCE OF 

itself ? In these crises through which our liberty is 
to pass, may not, must not, this function of conserva- 
tism become more and more developed, and more and 
more operative ? ^lay it not one day be written, for 
the praise of the American Bar, that it helped to 
keep the true idea of the State alive and germinant 
in the American mind ; that it helped to keep alive 
the sacred sentiments of obedience and reverence 
and justice, of the supremacy of the calm and grand 
reason of the law over the fitful will of the individual 
and the crowd ; that it helped to withstand the per- 
nicious sophism that the successive generations, as 
they come to life, are but as so many successive 
flights of summer flies, without relations to the past 
or duties to the future, and taught instead that all — 
all the dead, the living, the unborn — were one moral 
person, — one for action, one for suffering, one for 
responsibility, — that the engagements of one age 
may bind the conscience of another ; the glory or the 
shame of a day may brighten or stain the current of 
a thousand years of continuous national being? 
Consider the profession of the law, then, as an ele- 
ment of conservation in the American State. I think 
it is naturally such, so to speak ; but I am sure it is 
our duty to make and to keep it such. 

It may be said, I think with some truth, of the pro- 
fession of the Bar, that in all political systems and in 
all times it has seemed to possess a twofold nature ; 
that it has seemed to be fired by the spirit of liberty, 
and yet to hold fast the sentiments of order and rev- 
erence, and the duty of subordination; that it has 
resisted despotism, and yet taught obedience ; that it 
has recognized and vindicated the rights of man, and 



THE AMERICAN BAK. 139 

yet has reckoned it always among the most sacred 
and most precious of those rights, to be shielded and 
led b}^ the divine nature and immortal reason of law; 
that it appreciates social progression and contributes 
to it, and ranks in the classes and with the agents of 
progression, yet evermore counsels and courts perma- 
nence and conservatism and rest ; that it loves light 
better than darkness, and 3'et, like the eccentric or 
wise man in the old historian, has a habit of looking 
away as the night wanes to the western sky, to detect 
there the first streaks of returning dawn. 

I know that this is high praise of the professional 
character ; and it is true. See if there is not some 
truth in it. See at least whether we may not deserve 
it, by a careful culture of the intrinsical tendencies 
of our habitual studies and employments, and all that 
is peculiar to our professional life. 

It is certain, on the one hand, that the sympathies 
of the lawyer in our system are with the people and 
with liberty. They are with the greatest number of 
the people ; they are with what you call the masses ; 
he springs from them ; they are his patrons ; their 
^ favor gives him bread ; it gives him consideration ; it 
raises him, as Curran so gracefully said of himself, 
*'the child of a peasant, to the table of his prince." 
The prosperity of the people employs and enriches 
him. 

It does not fall within my immediate object to dwell 
longer on this aspect of the twofold nature of the 
profession of the Bar, — its tendencies and leanings 
to the people and to liberty. It might not be unin- 
structive to sustain and qualify the view by a glance 
at a few remarkable periods of its history, under a 



140 CONSERVATIVE FORCE OF 

few widely discriminated political systems of ancient 
States and times, — the Roman Bar, for example, be- 
fore and under the earliest times of the Empire ; the 
French Bar at the Revolution ; the American Bar 
from the planting of the colonies. But I must hasten 
to my principal purpose in this address, — an exhibi- 
tion of the other aspect of the profession, its function 
of conservatism. 

In proceeding to this, I think I may take for 
granted that conservatism is, in the actual circum- 
stances of this country, the one grand and compre- 
hensive duty of a thoughtful patriotism. I speak in 
the general, of course, not pausing upon little or in- 
evitable qualifications here and there, — not meaning 
any thing so absurd as to say that this law, or that 
usage, or that judgment, or that custom or condition, 
might not be corrected or expunged, — not meaning 
still less to invade the domains of moral and philan- 
thropic reform, true or false. I speak of our general 
political s^^stem ; our organic forms ; our written con- 
stitutions ; the great body and the general adminis- 
tration of our jurisprudence ; the general way in 
which liberty is blended with order, and the principle 
of progression with the securities of permanence ; the 
relation of the States and the functions of the Union, 
— and I say of it in a mass, that conservation is the 
chief end, the largest duty, and the truest glory of 
American statesmanship. 

There are nations, I make no question, whose his- 
tory, condition, and dangers call them to a different 
work. Til ere are those whom every thing in their 
history, condition, and dangers admonishes to reform 
fundamentally, if they would be saved. With them 



THE AMERICAN BAR. 141 

the whole political and social order is to be rearranged. 
The stern claim of labor is to be provided for. Its 
long antagonism with caj^ital is to be reconciled. 
Property is all to be parcelled out in some nearer 
conformity to a parental law of nature. Conven- 
tional discriminations of precedence and right are to 
be swept away. Old forms from which the life is 
gone are to drop as leaves in autumn. Frowning 
towers nodding to their fall are to be taken down. 
Small freeholds must dot over and cut up imperial 
parks. A large infusion of liberty must be poured 
along these emptied veins and throb in that great 
heart. With those, the past must be resigned ; the 
present must be convulsed, that " an immeasurable 
future," as Carlyle has said, " may be filled with fruit- 
fulness and a verdant shade." 

But with us the me of this mode and this deofree 
of reform is over ; its work is done. The passage of 
the sea, the occupation and culture of a new world, 
the conquest of independence, — these were our eras, 
these our agency, of reform. In our jurisprudence 
of liberty, which guards our person from violence and 
our goods from plunder, and which forbids the whole 
power of the State itself to take the ewe lamb, or to 
trample on a blade of the grass of the humblest citi- 
zen without adequate remuneration ; which makes 
every dwelling large enough to shelter a human life 
its owner's castle which winds and rain may enter 
but which the government cannot, — in our written 
constitutions, whereby the people, exercising an act 
of sublime self-restraint, have intended to put it out 
of their own power for ever, to be passionate, tumul- 
tuous, unwise, unjust ; whereby they have intended, 



142 CONSERVATIVE FORCE OF 

by means of a system of representation ; by means 
of the distribution of government into departments, 
independent, coordinate for checks and balances ; by 
a double chamber of legislation ; by the establish- 
ment of a fundamental and paramount organic law ; 
by the organization of a judiciary whose function, 
whose loftiest function it is to test the legislation of 
the day by this standard for all time, — constitutions, 
whereby by all these means they have intended to 
secure a government of laws, not of men ; of reason, 
not of will ; of justice, not of fraud, — in that grand 
dogma of equality, — equality of right, of burthens, 
of duty, of privileges, and of chances, which is the 
very mystery of our social being, — to the Jews, a 
stumbling-block ; to the Greeks, foolishness, — our 
strength, our glory, — in that liberty which we value 
not solely because it is a natural right of man ; not 
solely because it is a principle of individual energy 
and a guaranty of national renown ; not at all be- 
cause it attracts a procession and liglits a bonfire, 
but because, when blended with order, attended by 
law, tempered by virtue, graced by culture, it is a 
great practical good ; because in her right hand are 
riches, and honor, and peace ; because she has come 
down from her golden and purple cloud to walk in 
biightness by the weary ploughman's side, and whis- 
per in his ear as he casts the seed with tears, that the 
harvest which frost and mildew and canker-worm 
shall spare, the government shall spare also ; in our 
distribution into separate and kindred States, not 
wholly independent, not quite identical, in '' the wide 
arch of the ranged empire" above, — these are they 
in which tlie fruits of our age and our agency of re- 



THE AMERICAN BAR. 143 

form are embodied ; and these are they by which, if 
we are wise, — if we understand the things that be- 
long to our peace, — they may be perpetuated. It is 
for this that I say the fields of reform, the aims of 
reform, the uses of reform here, therefore, are wholly 
unlike the fields, uses, and aims of reform elsewhere. 
Foreign examples, foreign counsel, — well or ill meant, 
— the advice of the first foreign understandings, the 
example of the wisest foreign nations, are worse thaii 
useless for us. Even the teachings of history are to 
be cautiously consulted, or the guide of human life 
will lead us astray. We need reform enough. Heaven 
knows; but it is the reformation of our individual 
selves, the bettering of our personal natures; it is 
a more intellectual industry ; it is a more diffused, 
profound, and graceful, popular, and higher culture ; 
it is a wider development of the love and discernment 
of the beautiful in form, in color, in speech, and in the 
soul of man, — this is what we need, — personal, moral, 
mental reform, — not civil — not political I No, no ! 
Government, substantially as it is ; jurisprudence, 
substantially as it is ; the general arrangements of 
liberty, substantially as they are ; the Constitution 
and the Union, exactly as they are, — this is to be 
wise, according to the wisdom of America. 

To the conservation, then, of this general order of 
things, I think the profession of the Bar may be said 
to be assigned, for this reason, among others, — the 
only one which I shall seek to develop, — that its 
studies and employments tend to form in it and fit it 
to diffuse and impress on the popular mind a class of 
opinions — one class of opinions — which are indis- 
pensable to conservation. Its studies and offices train 



14-i CONSERVATIVE FORCE OE 

and arm it to counteract exactly that specific system of 
opinions by which our liberty must die, and to diffuse 
and impress those by which it may be kept alive. 

B}' what means a State with just that quantity of 
liberty in its constitution which belongs to the States 
of America, with just those organizations into which 
our polity is moulded, with just those proportions of 
the elements of law and order and restraint on the 
one hand, and the passionate love of freedom, and 
quick and liigh sense of personal independence on 
the other, — by what means such a State may be 
preserved through a full lifetime of enjoyment and 
glory, what kind of death it shall die, by what diag- 
nostics the approach of that death may be known, 
by what conjuration it is for a space to be charmed 
away, through what succession of decay and decadence 
it shall at length go down to the tomb of the nations, 
— these questions are the largest, pertaining to the 
things of this world, that can be pondered by the 
mind of man. More than all others, too, they con- 
found the wisdom of man. But some things we 
know. A nation, a national existence, a national 
history, is nothing but a production, nothing but an 
exponent, of a national mind. At the foundation of 
all splendid and remarkable national distinction there 
lie at last a few simple and energetic traits : a proud 
heart, a resolute will, sagacious thoughts, reverence, 
veneration, the ancient prudence, sound maxims, true 
wisdom ; and so the dying of a nation begins in the 
heart. There are sentiments concerning the true 
idea of the State, concerning law, concerning liberty, 
concerning justice, so active, so mortal, that if they 
pervade and taint the general mind, and transpire in 



THE AMEEICAN BAR. 145 

practical politics, the commonwealth is lost already. 
It was of these that the democracies of Greece, one 
after another, miserably died. It was not so much 
the spear of the great Emathian conqueror which 
bore the beaming forehead of Athens to the dust, as 
it was that diseased, universal opinion, those tumult- 
uous and fraudulent practical politics, which came at 
last to supersede the constitution of Solon, and the 
equivalents of Pericles, which dethroned the reason of 
the State, shattered and dissolved its checks, balances, 
and securities against haste and wrong, annulled 
its laws, repudiated its obligations, shamed away its 
justice, and set up instead, for rule, the passion, fe- 
rocity, and caprice, and cupidity, and fraud of a 
flushed majority, cheated and guided by sycophants 
and demagogues, — it was this diseased public opin- 
ion and these politics, its fruits, more deadly than the 
gold or the phalanx of Philip, that cast her down 
untimely from her throne on high. 

And now what are these sentiments and opinions 
from which the public mind of America is in danger, 
and which the studies and offices of our profession 
have fitted us and impose on us the duty to en- 
counter and correct? 

In the first place, it has been supposed that there 
might be detected, not yet in the general mind, but 
in what may grow to be the general mind, a singu- 
larly inadequate idea of the State as an unchangeable, 
indestructible, and, speaking after the manner of men, 
an immortal thing. I do not refer at this moment 
exclusively to the temper in which the Federal Union 
is regarded, though that is a startling illustration of 
the more general and deeper sentiment, but T refer in 

10 



146 CONSERVATIVE FOr.CE OF 

a larger view to what some have thought the popular 
or common idea of the civil State itself, its sacred- 
ness, its permanence, its ends, — in the lofty phrase 
of Cicero, its eternity. The tendency appears to be 
to reo-ard the whole concern as an association alto- 
gether at will, and at the will of everybody. Its 
boundary lines, its constituent numbers, its physical, 
social, and constitutional identity, its polity, its law, 
its continuance for ages, its dissolution, — all these 
seem to be held in the nature of so many open ques- 
tions. Whether our coiintrij — words so simple, so 
expressive, so sacred ; which, like father, child, wife, 
should present an image familiar, endeared, definite 
to the heart — whether our country shall, in the 
course of the next six months, extend to the Pacific 
Ocean and the Gulf, or be confined to the parochial 
limits of the State where we live, or have no exist- 
ence at all for us ; where its centre of power shall be ; 
whose statues shall be borne in its processions ; whose 
names, what da3^s, what incidents of glory commemo- 
rated in its anniversaries, and what symbols blaze on 
its flag, — in all this there is getting to be a rather 
growing habit of politic non-committalism. Having 
learned from Rousseau and Locke, and our own revo- 
lutionary age, its theories and its acts, that the State is 
nothing but a contract, rests in contract, springs from 
contract ; that government is a contrivance of human 
wisdom for human wants ; that the civil life, like the 
Sabbath, is made for man, not man for either ; having 
only about seventy years ago laid hold of an arbitrary 
fragment of the British empire, and appropriated it 
to ourselves, which is all the country we ever had ; 
having gone on enlarging, doubling, trebling, changing 



THE AMERICAN BAR. 147 

all this since, as a garment or a house ; accustomed 
to encounter every day, at the polls, in the market, 
at the miscellaneous banquet of our Liberty every- 
where, crowds of persons Avhom we never saw before, 
strangers in the countr}^, yet just as good citizens as 
ourselves ; with a whole continent before us, or half 
a one, to choose a home in ; teased and made peevish 
by all manner of small, local jealousies ; tormented 
by the stimulations of a revolutionary philanthropy ; 
enterprising, speculative, itinerant, improving, " stu- 
dious of change, and pleased with novelty " beyond 
the general habit of desultory man ; — it might al- 
most seem to be growing to be our national humor to 
hold ourselves free at every instant, to be and do just 
what we please, go where we please, stay as long as 
we please and no longer ; and that the State itself 
were held to be no more than an encampment of 
tents on the great prairie, pitched at sundown, and 
struck to the sharp crack of the rifle next morning, 
instead of a structure, stately and eternal, in which 
the generations may come, one after another, to the 
great gift of this social life. 

On such sentiments as these, how can a towering 
and durable fabric be set up ? To use the metaphor 
of Bacon, on such soil how can '-greatness be sown" ? 
How unlike the lessons of the masters, at whose feet 
you are bred ! The studies of our profession have 
taught us that the State is framed for a duration 
without end, — without end — till the earth and the 
heavens be no more. Sic constituta civitas ut eternal 
In the eye and contemplation of law, its masses may 
die ; its own corporate being can never die. If we 
inspect the language of its fundamental ordinance, 



148 CONSERVATIVE FORCE OF 

every word expects, assumes, foretells a perpetuity, 
lasting as " the great globe itself, and all which it 
inherit." If we go out of that record and inquire 
for the designs and the hopes of its founders ah extra^ 
we know that they constructed it, and bequeathed it, 
for the latest posterity. If we reverently rise to a 
conjecture of the purposes for which the Ruler of the 
world permitted and decreed it to be instituted, in 
order to discern how soon it will have performed its 
office and may be laid aside, we see that they reach 
down to the last hour of the life of the last man that 
shall live upon the earth ; that it was designed by the 
Infinite Wisdom, to enable the generation who framed 
it, and all the generations, to perfect their social, moral, 
and religious nature ; to do and to be good ; to pursue 
happiness; to be fitted, by the various discipline of 
the social life, by obedience, by worship, for the life 
to come. When these ends are all answered, the 
State shall die I When these are answered, inter eat 
et concidat omnis hie mundus ! Until they are an- 
swered, esto^ eritque perpetual 

In the next place, it has been thought that there 
was developing itself in the general sentiment, and in 
the practical politics of the time, a tendency towards 
one of those great changes by which free States have 
oftenest perished, — a tendency to push to excess the 
distinctive and characteristic principles of our system, 
whereby, as Aristotle has said, governments usually 
perish, — a tendency towards transition from the re- 
publican to the democratical era, of the history and 
epochs of liberty. 

Essentially and generally, it would be pronounced 
by those who discern it a tendency to erect the 



THE AMERICAN BAR. 149 

actual majorit}^ of the day into the de jure and actual 
government of the day. It is a tendency to regard 
the actual will of that majority as the law of the 
State. It is a tendency to regard the shortest and 
simplest way of collecting that will, and the prompt- 
est and most irresistible execution of it, as the true 
polity of liberty. It is a tendency which, pressed to 
its last development, would, if considerations of mere 
convenience or inconvenience did not hinder, do 
exactly this: it would assemble, the whole people in 
a vast mass, as once they used to assemble beneath 
the sun of Athens; and there, when the eloquent 
had spoken, and the wise and the foolish had coun- 
selled, would commit the transcendent questions of 
war, peace, taxation, and treaties; the disposition of 
the fortunes and honor of the citizen and statesman ; 
death, banishment, or the crown of gold ; the making, 
interpreting, and administration of the law ; and all 
the warm, precious, and multifarious interests of the 
social life, to the madness or the jest of the hour. 

I have not time to present what have been thought 
to be the proofs of the existence of this tendency ; 
and it is needless to do so. It would be presumptuous, 
too, to speculate, if it has existence, on its causes and 
its issues. I desire to advert to certain particulars 
in which it may be analyzed, and through which it 
displays itself, for the purpose of showing that the 
studies, employments, and, so to say, professional 
politics, of the bar are essentially, perhaps availably, 
antagonistical to it, or moderative of it. 

It is said, then, that you may remark this tendency, 
first, in an inclination to depreciate the uses and usurp 
the functions of those organic forms in which the 



150 CONSERVATIVE FORCE OF 

regular, definite, and legally recognized powers of the 
State are embodied, — to depreciate the uses and 
usurp the function of written constitutions, limita- 
tions on the legislature, the distribution of govern- 
ment into departments, the inde^^iendence of the 
judiciary, the forms of orderly proceeding, and all 
the elaborate and costly apparatus of checks and 
balances, by which, as I have said, we seek to secure 
a government of laws and not of men. 

'' The first condition," — it is the remark of a man 
of great genius, who saw very far by glances into the 
social system, Coleridge, — "the first condition in 
order to a sound constitution of the body politic is a 
due proportion between the free and permeative life 
and energy of the State and its organized powers." 
For want of tliat proportion the government of Ath- 
ens was shattered and dissolved. For want of that 
proportion the old constitutions of Solon, the reforms 
of Clisthenes, the sanctity of the Areopagus, the tem- 
peraments of Pericles, were burnt up in the torrent 
blaze of an unmitigated democracy. Every power 
of the State — executive, legal, judicial — was grasped 
by the hundred-handed assembly of the peojjle. The 
result is in her history. She became a byword of 
dissension and injustice ; and that was her ruin. 

I wonder how long that incomprehensible democ- 
racy would have hesitated, after the spirit of permea- 
tive liberty had got the better of the organized forms, 
upon our Spot Pond, and Long Pond, and Charles 
River water-questions. This intolerable hardship and 
circumlocution of applying to a legislature of three 
independent and coordinate departments, sitting un- 
der a written constitution, Avith an independent ju- 



THE AMEEICAN BAR 151 

diciary to hold it up to tlie fundamental law, — the 
hardship of applying to such a legislature for power to 
bring water into the city ; this operose machinery of 
orders of notice, hearings before committees, adverse 
reports, favorable reports rejected, disagreements of 
the two Houses, veto of Governor, a charter saving 
vested rights of other people, meetings of citizens in 
wards to vote unawed, unwatched, every man accord- 
ing to his sober second thought, — how long do you 
think such conventionalities as these would have kept 
that beautiful, passionate, and self-willed Athens, 
standing, like the Tantalus of her own poetry, plunged 
in crystal lakes and gentle historical rivers up to the 
chin, perishing with thirst? Why, some fine, sun- 
shiny forenoon, you would have heard the crier call- 
ing the people, one and all, to an extraordinary 
assembly, perhaps in the Piraeus, as a pretty full 
expression of public opinion was desirable and no 
other place would hold everybody ; you would have 
seen a stupendous mass-meeting roll itself together 
as clouds before all the winds ; standing on the outer 
edges of which you could just discern a speaker or 
two gesticulating, catch a murmur as of waves on the 
pebbly beach, applause, a loud laugh at a happy hit, 
observe some six thousand hands lifted to vote or 
swear, and then the vast congregation would separate 
and subside, to be seen no more. And the whole 
record of the transaction would be made up in some 
half-dozen lines to this effect, — it might be in ^s- 

chines, — that in the month of , under the archon- 

ate of , the tribe of ^ exercising the office of 

prytanes , an extraordinary assembly was called 

to consult on the supply of water ; and it appearing 



152 CONSERVATIVE FORCE OF 

that some six persons of great wealth and considera- 
tion liad opposed its introduction for some time past, 
and were moreover vehemently suspected of being no 
better than they should be, it was ordained that they 
should be fined in round sums, computed to be enough 
to bring in such a supply as would give every man 
equal to twenty-eight gallons a day ; and a certain 
obnoxious orator having inquired what possible need 
there was for so much a head, Demades, the son of 
the Mariner, replied, that that person was the very 
last man in all Athens who should put that question, 
since the assembly must see that he at least could 
use it to great advantage by washing his face, hands, 
and robes ; and thereupon the people laughed and 
separated. 

And now am I misled by the influence of vocation, 
when I venture to suppose that the profession of the 
Bar may do somewhat — should be required to do 
somewhat — to preserve the true proportion of liberty 
to organization, — to moderate and to disarm that 
eternal antagonism ? 

These " organic forms " of our system, — are they 
not in some just sense committed to your professional 
charge and care ? In this sense, and to this extent, 
does not 3'Our profession approach to, and blend itself 
with, one, and tliat not the least in dignity and use- 
fulness, of the departments of statesmanship ? Are 
you not thus statesmen while jon are lawyers, and 
because you are lawyers? These constitutions of 
government by which a free people have had the 
virtue and the sense to* restrain themselves, — these 
devices of profound wisdom and a deep study of man, 
and of the past, by which they have meant to secure 



THE AMERICAN BAR. 153 

the ascendency of the just, lofty, and wise, over the 
fraudulent, low, and insane, in the long run of our 
practical politics, — these temperaments by which 
justice is promoted, and by which liberty is made 
possible and may be made immortal, — and this jus 
publicum^ this great written code of public law, — are 
they not a part, in the strictest and narrowest sense, 
of the appropriate science of your profession? More 
than for any other class or calling in the community, 
is it not for you to study their sense, comprehend 
their great uses, and explore their historical origin 
and illustrations, — to so hold them up as shields, 
that no act of legislature, no judgment of court, no 
executive proclamation, no order of any functionary 
of any description, shall transcend or misconceive 
them, — to so hold them up before your clients and 
the public, as to keep them at all times living, intelli- 
gible, and appreciated in the universal mind ? 

Something such has, in all the past periods of our 
history, been one of the functions of the American 
Bar. To vindicate the true interpretation of the 
charters of the colonies, to advise what forms of pol- 
ity, what systems of jurisprudence, what degree and 
what mode of liberty these charters permitted, — to 
detect and expose that long succession of infringe- 
ment which grew at last to the Stamp Act and Tea 
Tax, and compelled us to turn from broken charters 
to national independence, — to conduct the transcend- 
ent controversy which preceded the Revolution, that 
grand appeal to the reason of civilization, — this was 
the w^ork of our first generation of lawyers. To con- 
struct the American constitutions, — the higher praise 
of the second generation. I claim it in part for the 



154 CONSERVATIVE FORCE OF 

sobriety and learning of the American Bar ; for the 
professional instinct towards the past ; for the pro- 
fessional appreciation of order, forms, obedience, re- 
straints ; for the more than professional, the profound 
and wide intimacy with the history of all liberty, 
classical, mediaeval, and, above all, of English lib- 
erty, — I claim it in part for the American Bar that, 
springing into existence by revolution, — revolution, 
which more than any thing and all things lacerates 
and discomposes the popular mind, — justifying that 
revolution only on a strong principle of natural right, 
with not one single element or agent of monarchy or 
aristocracy on our soil or in our blood, — I claim it 
for the Bar that the constitutions of America so nobly 
closed the series of our victories! These constitu- 
tions owe to the Bar more than their terse and exact 
expression and systematic arrangements ; they owe to 
it, in part, too, their elements of permanence ; their 
felicitous reconciliation of universal and intense lib- 
erty with forms to enshrine and regulations to restrain 
it ; their Anglo-Saxon sobriety and gravity conveyed 
in the genuine idiom, suggestive of the grandest civil 
achievements of that unequalled race. To interpret 
these constitutions, to administer and maintain them, 
this is the office of our age of the profession. Herein 
have we somewhat wherein to glory ; hereby we 
come into the class and share in the dignity of 
founders of States, of restorers of States, of pre- 
servers of States. 

I said and I repeat that, while lawyers, and because 
we are lawyers, we are statesmen. We are by pro- 
fession statesmen. And who may measure the value 
of this department of public duty? Doubtless in 



THE AMERICAN BAR. 155 

statesmanship there are many mansions, and large 
variety of conspicuous service. Doubtless to have 
wisely decided the question of war or peace, — to 
have adjusted by a skilful negotiation a thousand 
miles of unsettled boundary-line, — to have laid the 
corner-stone of some vast policy whereby the cur- 
rency is corrected, the finances enriched, the measure 
of industrial fame filled, — are large achievements. 
And yet I do not know that I can point to one 
achievement of this department of American states- 
manship, which can take rank for its consequences 
of good above that single decision of the Supreme 
Court, which adjudged that an act of legislature con- 
trary to the Constitution is void, and that the judicial 
department is clothed with the power to ascertain 
the repugnancy and to pronounce the legal conclusion. 
That the framers of the Constitution intended this 
should be so, is certain ; but to have asserted it against 
the Congress and the Executive, — to have vindicated 
it by that easy yet adamantine demonstration than 
which the reasonings of the mathematics show noth- 
ing surer, — to have inscribed this vast truth of con- 
servatism on the public mind, so that no demagogue, 
not in the last stage of intoxication, denies it, — this 
is an achievement of statesmanship of which a thou- 
sand years may not exhaust or reveal all the good. 

It has been thought, in the next place, that you 
'may remark this unfavorable tendency in a certain 
false and pernicious idea of law^ which to some extent 
possesses the popular mind, — law, its source, its na- 
ture, its titles to reverence. Consider it a moment, 
and contrast it with our idea of law. 



156 CONSERVATIVE FORCE OF 

It is one of the distemperatures to which an unrea- 
soning liberty may grow, no doubt, to regard law as 
no more nor less than just the will — the actual and 
present will — of the actual majority of the nation. 
The majority govern. What the majority pleases, it 
may ordain. What it ordains is law. So much for 
the source of law, and so much for the nature of law. 
But, then, as law is nothing but the will of a major 
number, as that will differs from the will of yesterday, 
and will differ from that of to-morrow, and as all law 
is a restraint on natural right and personal indepen- 
dciH-e, how can it gain a moment's hold on the reve- 
rential sentiments of the heart, and the profounder 
convictions of the judgment? How can it impress a 
filial awe ; how can it conciliate a filial love; how can 
it sustain a sentiment of veneration ; how can it com- 
mand a rational and animated defence? Such senti- 
ments are not the stuff from which the immortality 
of a nation is to be woven ! Oj)pose now to this the 
loftier j)hilosophy which we have learned. In the 
language of our system, the law is not the transient 
and arbitrary creation of the major will, nor of any 
will. It is not the offspring of will at all. It is the ji 
absolute justice of the State, enlightened by the per- 
fect reason of the State. That is law. Enlio'htened 
justice assisting the social nature to perfect itself by 
the social life. It is ordained, doubtless, that is, it is 
chosen, and is ascertained by the wisdom of man. 
But, then, it is the master-work of man. Quce est 
enim istorum oratio tarn exquisita^ quce sit anteponenda 
bene constitutoe civitati publico jure, et moribus ^ ^ 

^ Cicero de Republica, I. 2. 



THE AMERICAN BAR. 157 

By tlie costly and elaborate contrivances of our con- 
stitutions we have sought to attain the transcendent 
result of extracting and excluding haste, injustice, 
revenge, and folly from the place and function of 
giving the law, and of introducing alone the reason 
and justice of the w^isest and the best. By the aid 
of time, — time which changes and tries all things; 
tries them, and works them pure, — we subject the 
law, after it is given, to the tests of old experience, 
to the reason and justice of successive ages and gen- 
erations, to the best thoughts of the wisest and safest 
of reformers. And then and thus we pronounce it 
good. Then and thus we cannot choose but reverence, 
obey, and enforce it. We would grave it deep into 
the heart of the undjdng State. We would strengthen 
it by opinion, by manners, by private virtue, by habit, 
by the awful hoar of innumerable ages. All tliat 
attracts us to life, all that is charming in the perfected 
and adorned social nature, we wisely think or we 
wisely dream, we owe to the all-encircling presence 
of the law. Not even extravagant do we think it to 
hold, that the Divine approval may sanction it as not 
unworthy of the reason which we derive from His 
own nature. Not extravagant do we hold it to say, 
that there is thus a voice of the people which is the 
voice of God. 

Doubtless the known historical origin of the law 
contributes to this oj)inion of it. Consider for a 
moment — what that law really is, what the vast 
body of that law is, to the study and administration 
of which the lawyer gives his whole life, by which he 
has trained his mind, established his fortune, won his 
fame, the theatre of all his triumphs, the means of all 



158 CONSERVATIVE FORCE OF 

his usefulness, the theme of a thousand earnest pane- 
gyrics, — what is that law ? Mainly, a body of di- 
gested rules and processes and forms, bequeathed by 
what is for us the old and past time, not of one age, 
but all the ages of the past, — a vast and multifarious 
aggregate, some of whicli you trace above the pyra- 
mids, above the flood, the inspired wisdom of the 
primeval East ; some to tlie scarcely yet historical 
era of Pythagoras, and to Solon and Socrates ; more 
of it to the robust, practical sense and justice of 
Rome, the lawgiver of the nations ; more still to the 
teeming birthtime of the modern mind and life ; all 
of it to some epoch ; some of it to every epoch of the 
past of which history keeps the date. In the way in 
which it comes down to us, it seems one mighty and 
continuous stream of experience and reason, accumu- 
lated, ancestral, widening and deepening and washing 
itself clearer as it runs on, the grand agent of civili- 
zation, the builder of a thousand cities, the guardian 
angel of a hundred generations, our own hereditary 
laws. To revere such a system, would be natural 
and professional, if it were no more. But it is rea- 
sonable, too. There is a deej) presumption in favor 
of that which has endured so long. To say of any 
thing, that it is old, and to leave the matter there, — 
an opinion, a polity, a code, a possession, a book, — is 
to say nothing of praise or blame. But to have lived 
for ages; to be alive to-day, — in a real sense alive, 
— alive in the hearts, in the reason of to-day ; to have 
lived through ages, not swathed in gums and spices 
and enshrined in chambers of pyramids, but through 
ages of unceasing contact and sharp trial with the 
passions, interests, and affairs of the great world ; to 



THE AMERICAN BAR. 159 

have lived through the drums and tramplings of con- 
quests, through revolution, reform, through cycles of 
opinion running their round ; to have lived under 
many diverse systems of policy, and have survived 
the many transmigrations from one to another ; to 
have attended the general progress of the race, and 
shared in its successive ameliorations, — thus to have 
gathered upon itself the approbation or the senti- 
ments and reason of all civilization and all humanity, 
— that is, 2?er se, a 2-)riina-facie title to intelligent 
reo'ard. There is a virtue, there is truth, in that 
effacing touch of time. It bereaves us of our beauty; 
it calls our friends from our side, and we are alone ; it 
changes us, and sends us away. But spare what 
it spares. Spare till you have proved it. Where 
that touch has passed and left no wrinkle nor spot of 
decay, what it has passed and left ameliorated and 
beautified, whatever it be, stars, sea, the fame of the 
great dead, the State, the law, which is the soul of the 
State, be sure that therein is some spark of an im- 
mortal life. 

It is certain that in the American theory, the free 
theory of government, it is the right of the people, at 
any moment of its representation in the legislature, 
to make all the law, and, by its representatives in 
conventions, to make the Constitution anew. It is 
their right to do so peaceably and according to exist- 
ing forms, and to do it by revolution against all 
forms. This is the theory. But I do not know that 
any wise man would desire to have this theory every 
day, or ever, acted upon up to its whole extent, or to 
have it eternally pressed, promulgated, panegyrized 
as the grand peculiarity and chief privilege of our 



160 CONSERVATIVE FORCE OF 

condition. Acting upon this theory, we have made 
our constitutions, founded our policy, written the 
great body of our law, set our whole government 
going. It worked well. It works to a charm. I do 
not know that any man displays wisdom or common 
sense, by all the while haranguing and stimulating 
the people to change it. I do not appreciate the 
sense or humanity of all the while bawling: true, 
your systems are all good ; life, character, property, 
all safe, — but you have the undoubted right to rub 
all out and begin again. If I see a man quietly eat- 
ing his dinner, I do not know why I should tell him 
that there is a first-rate, extreme medicine, prussic 
acid, aquafortis, or what not, which he has a perfectly 
good right to use in any quantity he pleases! If a 
man is living happily with his wife, I don't know why 
I should go and say : yes, I see ; beautiful and vir- 
tuous ; I congratulate you, — but let me say, you can 
get a perfectl}^ legal divorce by going to Vermont, 
New Jersey, or Pennsylvania. True wisdom would 
seem to advise the culture of dispositions of rest, 
contentment, conservation. True wisdom would ad- 
vise to lock up the extreme medicine till the attack 
of the alarming malady. True wisdom would advise 
to place the power of revolution, overturning all to 
begin anew, rather in the background, to throw over 
it a politic, well-wrought veil, to reserve it for crises, 
exigencies, the rare and distant days of great historical 
epochs. These great, transcendental rights should be 
preserved, must be, will be. But perhaps you would 
place them away, reverentially, in the profoundest 
recesses of the chambers of the dead, down in deep 
vaults of black marble, lighted by a single silver 



THE AMERICAN BAR. 161 

lamp, — as in that vision of the Gothic king, — to 
which wise and brave men may go down, in the hour 
of extremity, to evoke the tremendous divinities of 
change from their sleep of ages. 

"Ni faciat, maria, ac terras, coelumque profundum, 
Quippe ferant rapidi secum, verrantque per auras." ^ 

To appreciate the conservative agency and func- 
tions of the legal profession, however, it is time to 
pass from an analysis of the sentiments and opinions 
which distinguish it, to the occupation by which it 
is employed. The single labor of our lives is the 
administration of the law ; and the topic on which 
I wish to say a word in conclusion is, the influence of 
the actual administration of law in this country on 
the duration of our free systems themselves. The 
topic is large and high, and well deserves what I may 
not now attempt, a profound and exact discussion. 

I do not know that in all the elaborate policy by 
which free States have sought to preserve themselves, 
there is one device so sure, so simple, so indispensable, 
as justice, — justice to all ; justice to foreign nations 
of whatever class of greatness or weakness ; justice 
to public creditors, alien or native ; justice to every 
individual citizen, down to the feeblest and the least 
beloved ; justice in the assignment of political and 
civil right, and place, and opportunity ; justice be- 
tween man and man, every man and every other, — 
to observe and to administer this virtue steadily, uni- 
formly, and at whatever cost, — this, the best policy 
and the final course of all governments, is pre-emin- 
ently the policy of free governments. Much the 

1 ^n. I. 58, 59. 

11 



162 CONSERVATIVE FORCE OF 

most specious objection to free systems is, that they 
have been observed in the long run to develop a 
tendency to some mode of injustice. Resting on a 
truer theory of natural right in their constitutional 
construction than any other polity, founded in the 
absolute and universal equality of man, and per- 
meated and tinged and all astir with this principle 
through all their frame, and, so far, more nobly just 
than any other, the doubt which history is supposed 
to suggest is, whether they do not reveal a tendency 
towards injustice in other ways. Whether they have 
been as uniformly true to their engagements. Whether 
property and good name and life have been quite as 
safe. Whether the great body of the jus 2?rivatum 
has been as skilfully composed and rigorously ad- 
ministered as under the less reasonable and attractive 
systems of absolute rule. You remember that Aris- 
totle, looking back on a historical experience of all 
sorts of governments extending over many years — 
Aristotle who went to the court of Philip a republi- 
can, and came back a republican — records, in his 
Politics, injustice as the grand and comprehensive 
cause of the downfall of democracies. The historian 
of the Italian democracies extends the remark to 
them. That all States should be stable in projDortion 
as they are just, and in proportion as they administer 
justly, is what might be asserted. 

If this end is answered ; if every man has his own 
exactly and uniformly, absolutism itself is found tol- 
erable. If it is not, liberty — slavery, are but dreary 
and transient things. Placida quies sub lihertate^ in 
the words of Algernon Sydney and of the seal of 
Massachusetts, — that is the union of felicities which 






THE AMERICAN BAR. 163 

should make the State immortal. Whether Repub- 
lics have usually perished from injustice, need not be 
debated. One there was, the most renowned of all, 
that certainly did so. The injustice practised by the 
Athens of the age of Demosthenes upon its citizens, 
and suffered to be practised by one another, was as 
marvellous as the capacities of its dialect, as the 
eloquence by which its masses were regaled, and 
swayed this way and that as clouds, as waves, — 
marvellous as the long banquet of beauty in which 
they revelled, — as their love of Athens, and their 
passion of glory. There was not one day in the 
whole public life of Demosthenes when the fortune, 
the good name, the civil existence of any consider- 
able man was safer there than it would have been at 
Constantinople or Cairo under the very worst forms 
of Turkish rule. There was a sycophant to accuse, 
a demagogue to prosecute, a fickle, selfish, necessitous 
court — no court at all, only a commission of some 
hundreds or thousands from the public assembly sit- 
ting in the sunshine, directly interested in the cause 
— to pronounce judgment. And he who rose rich and 
honored might be flying at night for his life to some 
Persian or Macedonian outpost, to die by poison on 
his way in the temple of Neptune. 

Is there not somewhat in sharing in that adminis- 
tration, observing and enjoying it, which tends to 
substitute in the professional and in the popular mind, 
in place of the wild consciousness of possessing sum- 
mary power, ultimate power, the wild desire to exert 
it, and to grasp and subject all things to its rule, — 
to substitute for this the more conservative sentiments 
of reverence for a law independent of, and distinct 



164 CONSERVATIVE FORCE OF 

from, and antagonistical to, the humor of the hour ? 
Is there not something in the study and administra- 
tive enjoyment of an ehiborate, rational, and ancient 
jurisprudence, which tends to raise the law itself, in m 
the professional and in the general idea, almost up to m 
the nature of an independent, superior reason, in one B 
sense out of the people, in one sense above them, — 
out of and above, and independent of, and collateral to, 
the people of any given day? In all its vast volumes 
of provisions, very little of it is seen to be produced 
by the actual will of the existing generation. The 
first thing we know about it is, that we are actually 
being governed by it. The next thing we know is, 
we are rightfully and beneficially governed by it. 
We did not help to make it. No man now living 
helped to make much of it. The judge does not 
make it. Like the structure of the State itself, we 
found it around us at the earliest dawn of reason, 
it guarded the helplessness of our infancy, it re- 
strained the passions of our youth, it protects the 
acquisitions of our manhood, it shields the sanctity 
of the grave, it executes the will of the departed. 
Invisible, omnipresent, a real yet impalpable existence, 
it seems more a spirit, an abstraction, — the whispered 
yet authoritative voice of all the past and all the 
good, — than like the transient contrivance of alto- 
gether such as ourselves. We come to think of it, 
not so much as a set of provisions and rules which 
we can unmake, amend, and annul, as of a guide 
whom it is wiser to follow, an authority whom it is 
better to obey, a wisdom which it is not unbecoming 
to revere, a power — a superior — whose service is 
perfect freedom. Thus at last the spirit of the law 



THE AMERICAN BAR. 165 

descends into the great heart of the people for heal- 
ing and for conservation. Hear the striking platon- 
isms of Coleridge : " Strength may be met with 
strength : the power of inflicting pain may be baffled 
by the pride of endurance : the eye of rage may be 
answered by the stare of defiance, or the downcast 
look of dark and revengeful resolve : and with all 
this there is an outward and determined object to 
which the mind can attach its j)assions and purposes, 
and bury its own disquietudes in the full occupation 
of the senses. But who dares struggle with an in- 
visible combatant, with an enemy which exists and 
makes us know its existence, but where it is we ask 
in vain ? No space contains it, time promises no con- 
trol over it, it has no ear for my threats, it has no 
substance that my hands can grasp or my weapons 
find vulnerable ; it commands and cannot be com- 
manded, it acts and is insusceptible of my reaction, 
the more I strive to subdue it, the more am I com- 
pelled to think of it, and, the more I think of it, the 
more do I find it to possess a reality out of myself, 
and not to be a phantom of my own imagination ; — 
that all but the most abandoned men acknowledge its 
authority, and that the whole strength and majesty of 
my country are pledged to support it ; and yet that 
for me its power is the same Avith that of my own 
permanent self, and that all the choice which is per- 
mitted to me consists in having it for my guardian 
angel or my avenging fiend. This is the spirit of 
Law, — the lute of Amphion, — the harp of Orpheus. 
This is the true necessity which compels man into the 
social state, now and always, by a still beginning, 
never ceasing, force of moral cohesion." ^ 

i The Friend. 



166 THE AMERICAN BAR. 

In supposing that conservation is the grand and 
prominent public function of the American Bar in 
the State, I have not felt that I assigned to a profes- 
sion, to which I count it so high a privilege to belong, 
a part and a duty at all beneath its loftiest claims. I 
shall not deny that to found a State which grows to 
be a nation, on the ruins of an older, or on a waste of 
earth where was none before, is, intrinsically and in 
the judgment of the world, of the largest order of 
human achievements. Of the chief of men are the 
conditores imj^eriorum. But to keep the city is only 
not less difficult and glorious than to build it. Both 
rise, in the estimate of the most eloquent and most 
wise of Romans, to the rank of divine achievement. 
I appreciate the uses and the glory of a great and 
timely reform. Thrice happy and honored who leaves 
the Constitution better than he found it. But to find 
it good and keep it so, this, too, is virtue and praise. 

It was the boast of Augustus, — as Lord Brougham 
remembers in the close of his speech on the improve- 
ment of the law, — that he found Rome of brick and 
left it of marble. Ay. But he found Rome free, and 
left her a slave. He found her a republic, and left 
her an empire ! He found the large soul of Cicero 
unfolding the nature, speaking the high praise, and 
recording the maxims of regulated liberty, with that 
eloquence which so many millions of hearts have 
owned, — and he left poets and artists! We find 
our city of marble, and we will leave it marble. Yes, 
all, all, up to the grand, central, and eternal dome ; 
we will leave it marble, as we find it. To that office, 
to that praise, let even the claims of your profession 
be subordinated. Pro clientihus scepe ; pro lege, pro 
repuhlica semper. ■ 



ELOQUENCE OE REVOLUTIONARY PERIODS. 167 



THE ELOQUENCE OF REVOLUTIONARY 
PERIODS : 

A LECTURE DELIVERED BEFORE THE MECHANIC APPREN- 
TICES' LIBRARY ASSOCIATION, FEBRUARY 19, 1857. 



If you consider deliberative eloquence, in its highest 
forms and noblest exertion, to be the utterances of 
men of genius practised, earnest, and sincere, accord- 
ing to a rule of art, in presence of large assemblies, 
in great conjunctures of public affairs, to i^er^uade a 
People, it is quite plain that those largest of all con- 
junctures, which you properly call times of revolution, 
must demand and supply a deliberative eloquence all 
their own. 

All kinds of genius, — I mean of that genius whose 
organ is art or language, and whose witness, hearer, 
and judge is the eye, ear, imagination, and heart of 
cultivated humanity, — if cast on a marked and stormy 
age, an age lifted above and out of the even, general 
flow of prescriptive life, by great changes, new ideas, 
and strong passions, extraordinary abilities and enter- 
prises, some grand visible revelation of the death- 
throes, birth-times, in which an old creation passes 
away and a new one comes to light, — all kinds of 
such genius, cast on such an age, are tinged and 
moulded by it. None so hardy, none so spiritual, 
none so individualized, none so self-nourished, none 



168 THE ELOQUENCE OF 

SO immersed in its own consciousness, subjectivity, 
and self-admiration, as not to own and bow to the 
omnipresent manifested spirit of the time. Goethe, 
Byron, Alfieri, the far mightier Milton, are ready 
illustrations of this. Between them and that crisis 
of the nations, and of the race in which they lived, 
on which they looked fascinated, entranced, how in- 
fluencive and inevitable the sympathy! Into that 
bright or dim dream of enchantment, invention, 
ideality, in which was their poet-life, how are the 
shapes of this outward world projected, how its cries 
of despair or triumph reecho there, that new heaven 
and new earth, their dwelling-place ; how they give 
back the cloud and storm, the sunshine and waning 
moon ; how they breathe the gales, and laugh with 
the flowers, and sadden with the wastes, of our earth 
and sky ! Topics, treatment, thoughts, characters, 
moods, — how they all but imitate and reproduce the 
real in the ideal, life in immortality. Take the ex- 
traordinary instance of Milton. That England of the 
great Civil War, the England of the Commonwealth 
and Cromwell, that England Avhich saw the king dis- 
crowned and beheaded, the House of Lords abolished, 
Puritanism triumphant on the bloody days of Worces- 
ter and Dunbar, the deliberations of the Long Parlia- 
ment, the Westminster Assembly constructing and 
promulgating its creed on the awful mysteries, — how 
does the presence and influence of that England seem 
to haunt you in " Samson Agonistes," in " Paradise 
Lost," in " Paradise Regained," — a memory, a sense 
of earth revived in the peace of the world beyond 
the grave, ages after death ! Milton's soul, if ever 
mortal spirit did so, was "a star, and dwelt apart." 



i 



REVOLUTIONARY PERIODS. 169 

Yet everywhere, almost, — in the dubious war on the 
plains of heaven ; in the debates of the synod of fallen 
demigods ; in the tremendous conception of that pride 
and will and self-trust, which rose in the Archangel 
ruined against the Highest; in those dogmas and 
those speculations of theology which wander unrest- 
ing, unanswered, through eternity ; in that tone of 
austere independence and indignant insubordination, 
obedient, however, to a higher law and a diviner vis- 
ion ; in that contempt of other human judgments, 
and defiant enunciation of its own, — everywhere 
you seem to meet the Puritan, the Republican, the 
defender of the claim of the people of England to be 
free ; the apologist, the advocate of the execution of 
kings ; the champion in all lands and all ages of the 
liberty of conscience, of speech, of the press ; the 
secretary, the counsellor of Cromwell ; the child, 
organ, memorial of the age. That heroic individ- 
uality, what was it but the product of a hard, unac- 
commodating, original, mighty nature, moulded and 
tinged by the tragic and sharp realities of national 
revolution? and it seems to go with him, j)aTtaking 
of its mixed original, whithersoever the song wanders, 
soars, or sinks, — in the paths of Eden, on the "peril- 
ous edge of battle " waged for the throne of God, in 
reporting the counsels of the Infinite in the past eter- 
nity, in hailing the Holy Light on which those orbs, 
overplied, as he consoled himself, in liberty's defence, 
were closed for ever. 

So, too, of the lesser but yet resplendent names of 

•Goethe, Byron, Alfieri : the spirit of the time was as 

vehement in them as it was in the young Napoleon. 

They shared its fire, its perturbed and towering mind, 



170 THE ELOQUENCE OF 

its longings, its free thinking, its passion of strong 
sensations, its deep insights, its lust of power and of 
change, and all its dark unrest, as fully as he did ; and 
they uttered its voices in those troubled, unequalled 
songs, as lie uttered them first at Marengo and Lodi 
by the cannon of his victories. 

Sometimes the blessedness of that great calm which 
follows the exhausted tempest of the moral heaven, 
in which the winds go down and the billows rock 
themselves to sleep, is imaged in the poems of an 
age. That most consummate effort of the finer genius 
of Rome, — the Georgics of Virgil, for example, — 
that decorated, abundant, and contented Italy that 
smiles there ; the cattle, larger and smaller, on so 
many hills ; the holidays of vintage ; the murmur of 
bees ; the happy husbandman ; the old, golden age of 
Saturn returning, — Avhat is all that but the long sigh 
of the people of Rome, the sigh of Italy, the sigh of 
the world, breathed through that unequalled harmony 
and sensibility, for peace, — peace under its vine and 
fig-tree, — peace, rest, after a hundred years of inse- 
curity, convulsion, and blood? 

Now, if that form of genius, — genius in art, in 
poetry, whose end is delight, whose wanderings 

*•' are where the IMuses liaunt 
Clear spring, or shady green, or sunny hill/' 

whose nourishment is 

" Of thoughts that voluntary move harmonious numbers," 

— if that kind, — solitary, introspective, the creature 
of the element, — takes a bias and a tincture from a 
strongly agitated time, how much truer must this be 
of that genius whose office, whose art, it is, by speech, 



REVOLUTIONARY PERIODS. 171 

by deep feelings and earnest convictions overflowing 
in eloquent speech, to communicate with the people 
of such a time directly upon the emotions it excites, 
the hopes it inspires, the duties it imposes, the tre- 
mendous alternative it holds out ? How inevitable 
that the eloquence of revolutions should be all com- 
pact of the passing hour ! How inevitable that the 
audiences such seasons assemble, the crises hurried 
onw^ard as the sea its succession of billows, the great 
passions they set on fire, the pity, the terror they jus- 
tify, the mighty interests they place at stake, the 
expansive and gorgeous ideas on which they roll, the 
simplicity, definiteness, and prominence of the objects 
which they set before all men's eyes, the concussion, 
the stimulation which they give to the whole medita- 
tive as well as emotional faculties of a generation, — 
how inevitable that such a conjunctive age and revo- 
lution should create its own style and tone and form 
of public speech! 

For what is a revolution ? I shall call it that agony 
through which, by which, — the accustomed course, 
the accustomed and normal ebb and flow, of the life 
of the State, being violently suspended, from causes 
in part internal, — a new nation is born, or an old 
nation dies, or by which, without losing its identity, 
a nation puts off its constitution of tyranny and be- 
comes free, self-governed, or is despoiled of its con- 
stitution of freedom and becomes enslaved, the slave 
of its own government. Such a change as either of 
these, — such a birth, such a dying, such emancipation, 
such enslavement, — such a change, — vast, violent, 
compressed within some comparatively brief time, 
palpable to all sense and all consciousness, so that 



172 THE ELOQUENCE OF 

thousands, millions, feel together that the spell of a 
great historical hour is upon them all at once, — such 
an one I call a revolution. And these are they which 
are transacted on the high places of the world, and 
make up the epic and the tragic matter of the story 
of nations. 

Illustrations of all these kinds will readily occur to 
you. Of one class, of a revolution in which a na- 
tional life expired, internal causes co-working with 
force from without, you see an instance, grand, sad, 
memorable in that day, when, in the downward age 
of Greece, that once radiant brow was struck by 
Philip, and by the successors of Alexander, for ever 
to the earth. Of a revolution in which a nation, 
keeping its life, its identity, exchanged a government 
of freedom for a government of tyranny, you have an 
instance, not less grand and memorable, bloodier and 
fuller of terror in its incidents and instrumentalities, 
in that time when republican Rome became the Rome 
of the Caesars, and the dignity of the Senate unrobed 
itself, and the proud and noble voice of the 2)eople 
in the forum died away in the presence of the purple 
and the guard. Of that type of revolution in which 
a nation, still keeping its life and identity, exchanges 
her constitution of slavery for one of freedom, or 
seems to do so, or rises to do so, you will recall the 
example of the France of 1789. Of that other type 
of revolution in which a nation begins, or seems to 
begin, to be, there are examples in Ireland in 1782, 
in America in 1776. These, and such as these, if 
other such there are, I call revolutions. 

In some things, — in causes, incidents, issues, les- 
sons, distinguished from one another by some traits 



REVOLUTIONARY PERIODS. 173 

of the eloquence they demand and supply, — there is 
a certain common character to them all ; and there 
are certain common peculiarities by which the elo- 
quence of them all is sure to be unlike, essentially, 
the whole public speech of times quieter, happier, less 
crowded, less glorious. 

Glance first at the common characteristics of all 
the deliberative eloquence of all the classes of revo- 
lutions, as I have defined revolution. 

If you bear in mind that the aim of deliberative 
eloquence is to 2:>ersuade to an action^ and that to per- 
suade to an action it must be shown that to perform 
it will gratify some one of the desires or affections or 
sentiments, — you may call them, altogether, ^asszows, 
— which are the springs of all action, some love of 
our own happiness, some love of our country, some 
love of man, some love of honor, some approval of 
our own conscience, some fear or some love of God, 
you see that eloquence will be characterized, — first, 
by the nature of the actions to which it persuades ; 
secondly, by the nature of the desire or affection or 
sentiment, — the nature of the passion, in other 
words, — by appeal to which it seeks to persuade to 
the action ; and then, I say, that the capital peculi- 
arity of the eloquence of all times of revolution, as I 
have described revolution, is that the actions it per- 
suades to are the highest and most heroic which men 
can do, and the passions it would inspire, in order to 
persuade to them, are the most lofty which man can 
feel. " High actions and high passions," — such are 
Milton's words, — high actions through and by high 
passions ; these are the end and these the means of 
the orator of the revolution. 



174 THE ELOQUENCE OF 

Hence are his topics large, simple, intelligible, 
affecting. Hence are his views broad, impressive, 
popular ; no trivial details, no wire-woven develop- 
ments, no subtle distinctions and drawing of fine 
lines about the boundaries of ideas, no speculation, 
no ingenuity ; all is elemental, comprehensive, in- 11 
tense, j)ractical, unqualified, undoubting. It is not 
of the small things of minor and instrumental poli- 
tics he comes to speak, or men come to hear. It is 
not to speak or to hear about permitting an Athenian 
citizen to change his tribe ; about permitting the 
Roman Knights to have jurisdiction of trials equally 
with the Senate ; it is not about allowing a .£10 
house-holder to vote for a member of Parliament; 
about duties on indigo, or onion-seed, or even tea. 

" That strain you hear is of an higher mood." 

It is the ralhing cr}^ of patriotism, of liberty, in the 
sublimest crisis of the State, — of man. It is a de- 
liberation of empire, of glory, of existence on which 
they come together. To be or not to be, — that is 
the question. Shall the children of the men of Mar- 
athon become slaves of Philip? Shall the majesty 
of the senate and people of Rome stoop to wear the 
chains forging by the military executors of the will 
of Julius Ca3sar? Shall the assembled representa- 
tives of France, just waking from her sleep of ages to 
claim the rights of man, — shall they disperse, their 
work undone, their work just commencing ; and shall 
they disperse at the order of the king ? or shall the 
messenger be bid to go, in the thunder-tones of Mira- 
beau, — and tell his master that "we sit here to do 
the will of our constituents, and that we will not be 



I 



REVOLUTIONARY PERIODS. 175 

moved from these seats but by the point of the bayo- 
net " ? Shall Ireland bound upward from her long 
prostration, and cast from her the last link of the 
British chain, and shall she advance " from injuries 
to arms, from arms to libertj^," from liberty to glory? 

Shall the thirteen Colonies become, and be, free 
and independent States, and come unabashed, un- 
terrified, an equal, into the majestic assembly of the 
nations ? These are the thoughts with which all 
bosoms are distended and oppressed. Filled with 
these, with these flashing in every eye, swelling 
every heart, pervading electric all ages, all orders, 
like a visitation, " an unquenchable public fire," men 
come together, — the thousands of Athens around the 
Bema, or in the Temple of Dionysus, — the people 
of Rome in the forum, the Senate in that council- 
chamber of the world, — the masses of France, as the 
spring-tide, into her gardens of the Tuileries, her 
club-rooms, her hall of the convention, — the repre- 
sentatives, the genius, the grace, the beauty of Ire- 
land into the Tuscan Gallery of her House of Com- 
mons, — the delegates of the Colonies into the Hall 
of Independence at Philadelphia, — thus men come, 
in an hour of revolution, to hang upon the lips from 
which they hope, they need, they demand, to hear 
the things which belong to their national salvation, 
hungering for the bread of life. 

And then and thus comes the orator of that time, 
kindling with their fire ; sympathizing with that 
great beating heart ; penetrated, not subdued ; lifted 
up rather by a sublime and rare moment of history 
made real to his consciousness ; charged with the 
very mission of life, yet unassured whether they will 



176 THE ELOQUENCE OF 

hear or will forbear ; transcendent good within their 
grasp, yet a possibility that the fatal and critical 
opportunity of salvation will be wasted ; the last 
evil of nations and of men overhanging, yet the siren 
song of peace — peace when there is no peace — 
chanted madly by some voice of sloth or fear, — there 
and thus the orators of revolutions come to work 
their work ! And what then is demanded, and how 
it is to be done, you all see ; and that in some of the 
characteristics of their eloquence they must all be 
alike. Actions^ not law or policy, whose growth and 
fruits are to be slowly evolved by time and calm ; 
actions daring, doubtful but instant ; the new things 
of a new world, — these are what the speaker coun- 
sels ; large, elementary, gorgeous ideas of right, of 
equality, of independence, of liberty, of progress 
through convulsion, — these are the principles from 
which he reasons, ivlien he reasons^ — these are the 
pinions of the thought on which he soars and stays ; 
and then the primeval and indestructible sentiments 
of the breast of man, — his sense of right, his estima- 
tion of himself, his sense of honor, his love of fame, 
his triumph and his joy in the dear name of country, 
the trophies that tell of the past, the hopes that gild 
and herald her dawn, — these are the springs of 
action to which he appeals, — these are the chords 
his fingers sweep, and from which he draws out the 
troubled music, " solemn as death, serene as the un- 
dying confidence of patriotism," to which he would 
have the battalions of the people march ! Directness, 
plainness, a narrow range of topics, few details, few 
but grand ideas, a headlong tide of sentiment and 
feeling ; vehement, indignant, and reproachful rea- 



REVOLUTIONARY PERIODS. 177 

sonings, — winged general maxims of wisdom and 
life ; an example from Plutarch ; a pregnant sentence 
of Tacitus ; thoughts going forth as ministers of nat- 
ure in robes of light, and with arms in their hands ; 
thoughts that breathe and words that burn, — these 
vaguely, approximately, express the general type of 
all this speech. 

I have spoken of some characteristics common to 
the eloquence of all revolutions. But the}^ differ 
from one another ; and their eloquence differs too. 

Take first that instance — sad, grand, and memo- 
rable for ever — in which Greece, prepared for it by 
causes acting within, perished at last by the gold and 
the phalanx of Macedon. The orator of that time is 
the first name in the ancient eloquence, in some re- 
spects — in the transcendent opportunity of his life 
and death at least — the first name in all eloquence, 
— Demosthenes. 

Begin with him, — the orator of the nation which 
is expiring. The most Athenian of the Athenians, 
the most Greek of all the Greeks, it was his mission 
to utter the last and noblest protest of Grecian inde- 
pendence, and to j)Our out the whole gathered, tradi- 
tional, passionate patriotism of tlie freest and most 
country-loving of all the races of man, in one final 
strain of higher mood tlian the world before or since 
has heard. The scheme of politics, the ethics, the 
public service, the eloquence, the whole life, of this 
man have all the unity and consistency of parts, — all 
the simplicity and rapid and transparent flow of a 
masterpiece of Attic art. That dying hour in the 
Temple of Neptune brought the long tragic action 
with a befitting grandeur and terror and pity to its 

12 



178 THE ELOQUENCE OF 

close. At the moment when he became of age to 
take on him the first duties of Athenian citizenship, 
he saw soonest of his countrymen, with keenest and 
justest discernment, that the independence of Athens 

— the independence of the whole old historical Greece 

— was directly and formidably assailed by the arms 
and the gold of a rising, half-barbarous military mon- 
archy on its northern frontier. If that Philip— if 
that Alexander — succeeded in the design so trans- 
parent to his eye, — so transparent to ours now, 
though some good men and wise men could not yet 
see it so, — the Greece of his birth, pride, and love, — 
that fair, kindred group of States, not straitly united 
by a constitution, yet to him, by language, by blood, 
by culture, by institutions, by tradition, by trophies, 
— "the descent and concatenation and distribution 
of glory," — by disdain of masters abroad and tyrants 
at home, seeming to him a beautiful identity, — that 
Greece would perish for evermore. To frustrate that 
design, was the 07ie single effort of the public life of 
Demosthenes of thirty years. To devise, to organize 
and apply, the means of doing so, was the one single 
task of all his statesmanship, all his diplomacy, all 
his plans of finance, all his political combinations, all 
his matchless eloquence. 

Whatsoever of usefulness, or goodness, or grand- 
eur there is in patriotism, — that patriotism which is 
employed in keeping its country alive, — all this 
praise is his. Some there were in that downward 
age — some ponderous historians of Greece there are 
now — who said and say that a Macedonian conquest 
was not so bad a thing ; that it was not so much a 
dying of Greece as a new life in another body, a 



I 



i 



REVOLUTIONARY PERIODS. 179 

higher being, a mere transmutation of matter, a mere 
diffusion of the race and language, the fountain 
merely sinking into the earth in Attica to rise in 
Syria, to rise in Alexandria. All these metaphysics 
of history were lost on him. He felt like a Greek 
who was a Greek. He felt that the identity of Greek 
political life consisted in this : that it owned no for- 
eign master, and that it acknowledged no despotic 
single will at home. Independence of all the world 
without ; self-government : the rule and the obedi- 
ence of law self-imposed ; rights and obligations 
reciprocally due, — due from man to man within the 
city, under the constitution, — this was in essence 
Grecian public life — Grecian life. Love of beauty 
and of glory, faultless taste, subtilty and fancy in su- 
preme degree, overflowing in an art, a poetry, a spec- 
ulative philosophy, an eloquence, a whole literature, 
— making up so large a part of our manifold and 
immortal inheritance from the past, — this was great- 
ness too, certainly. But it is in her pride of inde- 
pendence, and in her tempestuous internal freedom ; 
it is in Marathon or Thermopylse and the games of 
the Olympia — and that stormy, quick-witted, wilful 
and passionate people — that he recognized, that we 
recognize, the true and nobler individuality. 

To keep all this against the gold and the spear of 
that half-civilized military despotism — in the first 
rising strength of a new national life — was the 
mission, say rather the high endeavor of Demos- 
thenes. To this for a lifetime he gave himself, — he 
abandoned himself, — nor rested till all was over; 
and a little poison in a ring was all the dying mother 
could leave her child to help him escape her mur- 



180 THE ELOQUENCE OF 

derers and his ; death by poison in the temple on 
the island, — praise, tears, and admiration through all 
time. 

You see at once, in the singleness and simplicity, 
yet difficulty and grandeur, of the work he had to 
work, an explanation of many of the characteristics 
of his eloquence usually dwelt on, — its directness, 
its perspicuity, its disdain of ornament, its freedom 
from dissertation, and refining, and detail, and weari- 
some development, — the fewness of its topics, the 
limited range of its ideas, — its harmony and unity 
of spirit and effect^ — the whole speech of three 
hours seeming but one blow of a thunderbolt, by 
which a tower, a furlong of a city-wall, might tumble 
down, — its austere, almost fierce, gloomy intensity 
and earnestness, — its rapidity and vehemence, — the 
indignation, the grief, the wonder, the love which 
seem to cry out, " Why will ye die ? " 

But this brings me to say that there are other 
characteristics less spoken of : here and there through 
these grand exhortations there breathes another tone, 
for which you must seek another solution. That 
spirit — so vehement, so enthusiastic, so hopeful, so 
bold — was clear-sighted too ; and he could not fail 
to discern in all things around him but too much 
cause to fear that he had come on the last times of 
Greece. Yes, he might well see and feel that it was 
his to be the orator of the expiring nation ! 

The old public life of Greece was in its decay. 
The outward, visible Athens seemed unchanged. 
There she sat, as in the foretime, on her citadel rock, 
in sight of her auxiliar sea, crowned, garlanded, 
wanton, with all beauty, all glory, and all delight. 



REVOLUTIONARY PERIODS. 181 

Yet all was changed! There stood the walls of 
Themistocles ; but the men of Marathon, where were 
they ? Instead — vanity, effeminacy, sensual self- 
indulgence, sordid avarice, distrust of the gods, — 
the theatre, the banquet, the garland dripping with 
Samian wine ! 

The second childhood had come. Like their own 
grasshoppers, they would make their old age an un- 
graceful infancy, an evening revel, and sing their fill. 
Gleams of the once matchless race and time broke 
through here and there, and played on the surface, 
as the sun setting on Salamis ; but the summer was 
ending ; the day was far spent ; the bright consum- 
mate flower that never might in other climate grow, 
was fain to bow to the dread decree of eternal change ! 

The great statesman was himself unchanged. His 
whole public life, therefore, was a contention. It was 
one long breathing, one long trust, one long ^^I'ayer 
that these dry bones might live. 

Therefore, also, ever, there seems to me through 
all that fire, sublimity, and confidence, a certain — 
I know not what I should call it — a half-indulged, 
half-repressed consciousness that all is lost, and all is 
vain ! It is as if the orator were a prophet too, and 
the vision he saw confronted and saddened the speech 
he uttered. There is the expostulation, the reproach, 
the anger, the choking grief of a patriot who has 
his whole country, literally, within the sound of his 
voice, among the scenes of all their glory, who knows 

— who thinks he knows — as well as he knows his 
own existence, that if they will, they shall be free, 

— who cannot let go the dear and sweetest error, if 
it is so, of salvation possible to the State, and yet, 



182 THE ELOQUENCE OF 

when the pause of exhaustion comes, and the vision 
his wishes had sketched shows less palpably, and the 
glow of the spirit sinks, almost owns to himself that 
the hope he felt was but the resolution of despair. 

"I see a hand you cannot see, 
I hear a voice you cannot hear! " 

Three days of this man's life stand out to the im- 
agination from its grand, sad, general tenor. 

First of these was that in his thirtieth jenr when 
he pronounced his first oration against Philip of 
Macedon. That day — without office, without even 
call b}^ the people, without waiting for the veteran 
haranguers and advisers of the city toward whom the 
assembly was looking to hear, when the sacrifices had 
been performed, and the herald had made procla- 
mation — he went up to counsel his countrymen ; and 
when he had concluded, he, the son of the sword 
manufacturer, — a young man, in the yet early flush 
and enthusiasm of public virtue, — had practically, 
without formal suffrage, elevated himself to the chief 
magistracy of Athens for all the future lifetime of 
Athenian freedom. He sprung up that day by one 
bound to this height so dazzling, and there he stood 
till the eye of Greece was closed for ever. As he 
came down from that stage on which Pericles had 
spoken to a former generation, not unconscious of the 
actual triumph, some feeling of the gr(?ater future 
in the instant, — a grave expectation on that stern, 
melancholy face, that the midnight studies in the 
cave by the sea had loosed the tongue of the stam- 
merer ; tliat the closed lips had been touched by fire, 
and the deep miraculous fountain of eloquence been 






REVOLUTIONAKY PERIODS. 183 

unsealed, — I can imagine him to say, "And these 
applauses I have won by no flattery of the people ; 
no sophistries ; no rhetoric ; no covmsels of self-in- 
dulgence ; no siren song transforming to beasts ! As 
I have won let me keep them. Be mine to avow that 
without regenerated Athens Greece already has her 
master. Be mine to open my country's eye to the 
whole danger and the single remedy ; to turn these 
States away from their idle fears of Persia and their 
senseless jealousy of each other, and fix their appre- 
hensions on their true enemy, perhaps their destroyer, 
this soldier of Macedon. Be mine to persuade old 
men and rich men to give, and young men, spurning 
away the aid of mercenaries, themselves to strike for 
Greece by sea and land as in her heroic time. Be 
mine to lift up the heart of this Athens ; to erect the 
spirit of this downward age ; to re enthrone the sen- 
timent of duty for its own sake, — the glory of effort, 
the glory of self-sacrifice and of suffering, to reen- 
throne these fading sentiments in the soul of my 
people, — or all is lost — is lost ! " 

And as these thoughts which embody his exact 
whole public life came on him, I can imagine him 
turning away from the applauses of an audience that 
had found by a sure instinct in that essay of an hour 
its mightiest orator in that young man, — turning 
the sight up from the Salamis and the busy city be- 
neath, and pausing to stay his spirit by the cheerful 
and fair religions of the Acropolis, — that temple, 
that fortress, that gallery of the arts, — serene and 
steadfast as the floor of Olympus, — and then de- 
scending homewards to begin his great trust of guid- 
ing the public life of expiring Greece. 



184 THE ELOQUENCE OF 

Turn to his next great day. Twelve years ha\« 
passed, and the liberties of Greece have been cloven 
down at Chseronea for ever. Philip is dead, and the 
young Alexander is master. And now, in this hour 
of her humiliation, he who had advised and directed 
the long series of her unavailing warfare ; to whose 
eloquence, to whose fond dream, to whose activity, 
to whose desperate fidelity incorrupt, she owed it, 
that she had fallen as became the mother of the men 
of Marathon, — he is arraigned for this whole public 
life, and rises before an audience gathered of all 
Greece — gathered of all the lettered world, to vindi- 
cate his title to the crown. 

The youthful orator has grown to be a man of fifty- 
two. For him, for Greece, the future now is indeed 
a dream. Some possible chance, some god, some 
oracle, may give to strike another blow ; but for the 
present all is over — is over ! It is the glory or the 
shame of the past which is to be appreciated now. 
It is the dead for freedom for whom he is to give 
account. It is for a perished nation that he comes 
there and then to be judged. Others have laid down 
the trust of public life at the close of splendid suc- 
cesses. His administration saw liberty and the State 
expire. Others could point the nation they had been 
conducting to some land of promise beyond the river ; 
to some new field and new age of greatness ; " to 
future sons and daughters yet unborn," and so chal- 
lenge the farewell applauses of their time. He and 
his Athens had lost all things, — independence, na- 
tional life, hope, all things but honor ; and how sliould 
he answer, in that day, for his share in contributing 
to a calamity so accomplished ? How he answered 



REVOLUTIONARY PERIODS. 185 

all men know. In the noblest deliberative discourse 
ever uttered by mortal lips, there, in their presence 
who had seen his outgoings and incomings for his 
whole public life, who had known his purity, his 
wisdom, his civil courage ; who had sympathized, 
had trembled, had kindled with all his egiotions of a 
lifetime ; in whose half-extinguished virtue he had 
lighted up the fire of a better age, he reviewed that 
grand and melancholy story ; he gave them to see 
through that pictured retrospect how it had been 
appointed to them to act in the final extremity of 
Greece ; what dignity, what responsibleness, what 
tragic and pathetic interest, had belonged to their 
place and fortunes ; how they had been singled out 
to strike the last blow for the noblest cause ; and how 
gloriously they had been minded, without calculation 
of the chances of success or failure, to stand or fall 
in the passes of the dear mother land ! All that 
Greece had in her of the historical past — all of let- 
ters, refinement, renowned grace and liberty — all 
was represented by you, and nobly have ye striven 
to defend it all ! Grandly ye resolved ; grandly ye 
have resisted ; grandly have ye fallen ! 

That day he read his history in a nation's eyes. 
The still just, stricken heart of the people of Athens 
folded the orator-statesman to its love, and set on his 
head for ever the crown of gold ! 

One day more was wanting to that high tragic 
part, and how that was discharged Plutarch and 
Lucian have imagined strikingly. If it were a death 
self-inflicted, our moral judgments must deeply de- 
plore and condemn. Some uncertainty attends the 
act ; and, from the Grecian standpoint, we may ad- 
mit its pathos and own its grandeur. 



186 THE ELOQUENCE OF 

Sixteen years had now passed since the fatal battle 
of Chajronea, — eight since the pleading for the 
crown. He was now in the sixtieth year of his life. 
In that time the final struggle of Greece was at- 
tempted, — another attempt, — and all was over. In 
August, three hundred and twenty-tAvo years before 
Christ, a decisive victory of the Macedonians had 
scattered the hasty levies of the Greeks, — the Mace- 
donian conqueror came near to Athens ; stationed a 
garrison of her conquerors above the harbor to com- 
mand it ; abolished the democratical constitution, 
and decreed the banishment of twelve thousand 
Athenian citizens. One thing more was wanting to 
attest that Athens, that Greece had completely per- 
ished at length — and that was the surrender of the 
orator to atone by death for the resistance which he 
had so long persuaded his countrymen to attempt 
against her ultimate destroyer. This surrender ihe 
conqueror demanded. He had no longer a country 
to protect him by arms. Could she do it by her 
gods ? He withdrew to an island some miles from 
Athens, and there sought an asylum in the temple 
of Neptune. The exile hiniter came with his Thra- 
cians to the door, and would have persuaded him to 
commit himself to what he called the clemency of 
the king of Macedon. I give the rest in a free trans- 
lation from Lucian. 

" I dread the clemency which you offer me," he 
answered, "more than the torture and death for 
which I had been looking ; for I cannot bear that it 
be reported that the king has corrupted me by the 
promise of life to desert the ranks of Greece, and 
stand in those of Macedon. Glorious and beautiful 






REVOLUTIONARY PERIODS. 187 

I should have tliouglit it, if that life could have been 
guarded by my country; by the fleet; by the walls 
which I have builded for her ; by the treasury I have 
filled ; by her constitution of popular liberty ; by her 
assemblies of freemen ; by her ancestral glory ; by 
the love of my countrymen who have crowned me so 
often ; by Greece which I have saved hitherto. But 
since this may not be, if it is thus that this island, 
this sea, this temple of Neptune, these altars, these 
sanctities of religion cannot keep me from the court 
of the king of Macedon, a spectacle, — a slave, — I, 
Demosthenes, whom nature never formed for dis- 
grace, — I, who have drunk in from Xenophon, from 
Plato, the hope of immortality, — I, for the honor of 
Athens, prefer death to slavery, and wrap myself 
thus about with liberty, the fairest winding sheet ! " 
And so he drew the poison from his ring, and smiled 
and bade the tyrant farewell, and died, snatched op- 
portunely away by some god, his attendant reported, 
— great unconquered soul ; and the voice of Greece 
was hushed for ever. 

Next for instruction and impressiveness to the 
revolution by wdiich a nation dies, is that in which, 
preserving its life, it is compelled to exchange a con- 
stitution of freedom for the government of tyranny. 
And in this class the grandest, most bloody, memora- 
ble, and instructive in the history of man, is that 
by which republican Rome became the Rome of the 
Csesars ; and senate, consul, knights, tribune, people, 
the occasional dictator, all were brought down on a 
wide equality of servitude before the emperor and 
the army. Of the aspect of such a revolution in 
eloquence, you have an illustration of extraordinary 



188 THE ELOQUENCE OF 

interest and splendor in the instance of Cicero, that 
greatest name by far of the whole Roman mental and 
lettered culture, — the most consummate production 
of the Latin tj-pe of genius, — the one immortal 
voice of the Latin speech, by universal consent ; 
teacher, consoler, benefactor of all ages, — in whom 
Augustine and Erasmus could find and love a kind 
of anticipated approximative Christianity. Turning 
from all he wrote, spoke, did, and suffered beside, all 
his other studies, all his other praise, fix your eye on 
him now, as the orator of the expiring liberty of the 
commonwealth. 

He was murdered, in the sixty-fourth year of his 
life, by the -triumvirate of soldiers, Augustus, Lepi- 
dus, and Mark Antony, who had just consummated 
the overthrow of that republic, extinguished the 
hopes the death of Julius Caesar had excited, and 
were in the act to set up the frowning arch of the 
ranged empire. His death not only closed the pre- 
scription, as Antony said, but it did more ; it closed 
and crowned, with a large, tragic interest, that most 
stupendous of revolutions, which, beginning years 
before, (he is a wise man who can tell you when it 
began), transformed at length republican Rome into 
the Rome of Augustus, of Tiberius, and passed the 
dominion of the world, from the senate and people of 
the one Eternal City, to an Emperor and his legions. 
With his life the light of freedom went out. Till 
that voice was hushed, the triumph of despotism 
seemed insecure ; it was fit, her grandest themes and 
her diviner nourishment of liberty forbidden, that 
eloquence should die. 

No great man's life had ever a grander close. The 



REVOLUTIONARY PERIODS. 189 

stream of the revolution in which the republic was to 
perish had swept all Rome along, him with the rest, 
unsjanpathizing, resisting. It seemed to have con- 
summated the downfall of tlie constitution when it 
made Julius Caesar perpetual dictator. But he was 
slain by the conspirators in March of the forty-fourth 
year before Christ ; and with this event, though he 
had not been of the conspiracy, the hopes of Cicero 
to stay the bloody and dark tide, and to reestablish 
and reform the constitution of the republic, revived 
at once ; and thenceforward, with scarcely the inter- 
mission of sleep, he gave himself to the last — they 
proved to be last — proud and sad offices of Ro- 
man liberty, until all such hopes were quenched in 
his blood. In that interval of not quite two years, I 
rejoice to say that no worshipper of the Csesars of 
that day or this, no envier and sneerer at transcendent 
and prescriptive reputations, no laborious pedant judg- 
ing of high souls by his own small one, and loving 
his own crochet better than the fame of the truly 
great departed, — no Appian, nor Dion Cassius, nor 
Dr. Hooke, nor Merivale, nor Drumann, — not one 
of them in those last two years pretends to find, by 
his microscoj)e fitted into the end of his telescope, 
one spot on the sun going down. In all things and 
in all places of duty, by wise counsels given freely, 
by correspondence with the generals of the republic 
in arms, by personal intercourse with patriots at 
Rome, by universal activity and effective influence, 
by courage, by contempt of death, by eloquence, 
ringing sweeter and nobler in the senate-house and 
in the meetings of the people, each strain sweeter 
and nobler than the former till the last, — he shone 



190 THE ELOQUENCE OF 

out, last and greatest of Romans. " For myself," he 
said, in one of the fourteen immortal discourses in 
the senate, " I make this profession. I defended the 
Commonwealth when I was young. I will not desert 
her now that I am old. . I despised the swords of 
Catiline; shall I tremble at those of Antony? Nay, 
joyfully rather would I yield this frame to a bloody 
death, if so I might win back freedom to the State." 
That lofty profession he held fast — to the end. 
That death it was his to welcome ! It could not 
give to Rome the freedom for which she was no 
longer fit ; yet had he " the consolation, the joy, the 
triumph " not to survive it, and to leave an examj^le, 
which is of the lessons of liberty and glory unblamed, 
to-day and for ever. 

I know very well that there is a theory of history, 
and rather a taking theory too, which would bereave 
him, and all the other great names of the last ages of 
the republic, of their wreath, and set it on the brow 
of the first Csesar and the second, of Julius Csesar 
and Csesar Augustus. There is a theory, that it was 
time the republic should end, and the empire begin. 
Liberty, they say, had failed splendidly. It had 
grown an obsolete idea. It was behind the age. In 
the long, fatal flow of that stream of development 
and necessity, which they say represents the history 
of man, the hour was reached in which it was fit that 
one despotic will and one standing army should rule 
the w^orld. That hour, they tell you, Cicero ought 
to have recognized ; that will he ought piously to have 
hailed in the person of Csesar, and the person of An- 
tony. And so he mistook the time ; and died con- 
tending vainly and ungracefully with destiny, and 



REVOLUTIONARY PERIODS. 191 

built his monument on sands over which, he should 
have seen, the tide of the ages was rising already. 

But is not such a theory as this, in such an applica- 
tion of personal disparagement as this, about as poor, 
shallow, heartless, and arrogant a pedantry as any in 
the whole history of the follies of learning? This 
judgment of a man's actions, soul, genius, prudence, 
by the light of events that reveal themselves five 
hundred or one hundred years after he is in his grave, 
— how long has that been thought just? Because 
now we are able to see that the struggle of liberty 
against mailed despotism, — of the senate and people 
of Rome against the spirit of Csesar in arms, say 
rather the spirit of the age, was unavailing, — shall 
we pronounce in our closets that a patriot-senator, a 
man made consul from the people according to the 
constitution, bred in the traditions, bathed in the 
spirit, proud of that high, Roman fashion, of freedom, 
was a child not to have foreseen it as well ? Because 
he ought to have foreseen it, and did so, was it, there- 
fore, not nobler to die for liberty than to survive her ? 
Is success all at once to stand for the test of the excel- 
lency of dignity, and the excellency of honor ? Be 
it, that to an intelligence that can take in the ages of 
time and eternity and the greatest good of a universe 
of being, the republic might seem to have fulfilled its 
office, and that it was better the empire should take 
its place, as the seed cannot quicken except it die : 
does it follow that we are to love and honor the un- 
conscious human instruments of the dread change 
more than those who courageously withstood it, — 
Julius CsDsar, the atheist and traitor ; Augustus, the 
hypocrite ; Antony, the bloody and luxurious, who 



192 THE ELOQUENCE OF 

conquered the constitution, — better than Cato or 
Catullus, or Brutus or Cicero, who stood round it in its 
last gasp ? Because offences must come, shall not the 
moral judgments of men denounce the woe against 
him by whom they come ? Easy is it, and tempting 
for the i\Ierivales and Congreves (I am sorry to see 
De Quincey in such company) to say the senate and 
people of Rome were unfit to rule the world they had 
overrun ; and, therefore, it was needful for an em- 
peror and his guard and his legions to step in ; easy 
and tempting is such a speculation, because nobody 
can disprove it, and it sounds of philosophy, seems 
to be ncAV. But when they pursue it so far as to see 
no grandeur in the struggle of free-will with circum- 
stance, and of virtue and conscience with force, and 
feel no sympathy with the resistance which patriotism 
desperately attempts against treason, I reject and hoot 
it incredulously. 

How soothing and elevating to turn from such phi- 
losophy, falsely so called, to the grand and stirring 
music of that eloquence — those last fourteen plead- 
ings of Cicero, which he who has not studied knows 
nothing of the orator, nothing of the patriot — in 
which the Roman liberty breathed its last. From that 
purer eloquence, from that nobler orator, the great 
trial of fire and blood through which the spirit of 
Rome was passing had burned and purged away all 
things light, all things gross ; the purple robe, the 
superb attitude and action, the splendid common- 
places of a festal rhetoric, are all laid by ; the un- 
graceful, occasional vanity of adulation, the elaborate 
speech of the abundant, happy mind, at its ease, all 
disappear ; and, instead, what directness, what plain- 



I 



REVOLUTIONARY PERIODS. 193 

ness, what rapidity, what fire, what abnegation of 
himself, what disdain, what hate of the usurper and 
the usurpation, what grand, swelling sentiments, what 
fine raptures of liberty, roll and revel there. How 
there rise above and from out that impetuous torrent 
of speech, rushing fervidly, audibly, distinctly, be- 
tween the peals of that thunder with which, like a 
guardian divinity, he seems to keep the senate-house, 
and the forum where the people assembled, unpro- 
faned by the impending tyranny, — how there rise, 
here and there, those tones, so sweet, so mournful, 
boding and prophetic of the end. Almost you ex- 
pect, — when the sublime expostulation is ended, and 
the fathers of the republic rise all together from their 
seats to answer the appeal by a shout in the spirit of 
the time of Tarquin the Proud, and the Second Punic 
War, and the ten thousand voices of the multitude 
are calling the orator to come out from the senate- 
house and speak to them in the forum, out of doors, 
to them, also, of the perils and the chances of their 
freedom, — almost you expect to hear, in the air, as 
above the temple of the doomed Jerusalem, the awful, 
distant cry, Let us go hence ! let us go hence ! The 
alternative of his own certain death, if the republic 
fell resisting, — what pathos, what dignity, what sin- 
cerity, what merit intrinsical, it gives to his brave 
counsels of resistance ! 

"Lay hold on this opportunity of our salvation. 
Conscript Fathers, — by the Immortal Gods I conjure 
you ! — and remember that you are the foremost 
men here, in the council chamber of the whole earth. 
Give one sign to the Roman people that even as now 
they pledge their valor — so you pledge your wisdom 

13 



194 THE ELOQUENCE OF 

to the crisis of the State. But what need that I ex- 
hort you? Is there one so insensate as not to under- 
stand that if we sleep over an occasion such as this, 
it is ours to bow our necks to a tyranny not proud 
and cruel only, but ignominious, — but sinful? Do 
ye not know this Antony ? Do 3'e not know his 
companions ? Do ye not know his whole house, — 
insolent, — impure, — gamesters, — drunkards ? To 
be slaves to such as he, to such as these, were it not 
the fullest measure of miserj^, conjoined with the 
fullest measure of disgrace ? If it be so — may 
the gods avert the omen — that the supreme hour of 
the republic has come, let us, the rulers of the world, 
rather fall with honor, than serve with infamy ! Born 
to glory and to liberty, let us hold these bright dis- 
tinctions fast, or let us greatly die ! Be it, Romans, 
our first resolve to strike down the tyrant and the 
tyranny. Be it our second to endure all things for 
the honor and liberty of our country. To submit to 
infamy for the love of life can never come within the 
contemplation of a Roman soul ! For you, the peo- 
ple of Rome, — jou. whom the gods have appointed 
to rule the world, — for you to own a master is im- 
pious. 

" You are in the last crisis of nations. To be free 
or to be slaves, — that is the question of the hour. 
By every obligation of man or States it behooves you 
in this extremity to conquer, — as your devotion to 
the gods and your concord among yourselves encour- 
age you to hope, — or to bear all things but slavery. 
Other nations may bend to servitude ; the birthright 
and the distinction of the people of Rome is liberty." 

Turn, now, to another form of revolution altogether. 



II 



KEVOLUTIONARY PERIODS. 195 

Turn to a revolution in which a people, who were 
not yet a nation, became a nation, — one of the great, 
creative efforts of history, her rarest, her grandest, 
one of her marked and widely separated geological 
periods, in which she gathers up the formless and 
wandering elements of a preexisting nature, and 
sha23es them into a new world, over whose rising the 
morning stars might sing again. And these revolu- 
tions have an eloquence of their own, also ; but how 
unlike that other, — exultant, trustful, reasonable, 
courageous ! The cheerful and confident voice of 
young, giant strength rings through it, — the silver 
clarion of his hope that sounds to an awakening, to 
an onset, to a festival of glory, preparing! prepar- 
ing! — his look of fire now fixed on the ground, now 
straining towards the distant goal ; his heart assured 
and high, yet throbbing with the heightened, irregu- 
lar pulsations of a new consciousness, beating un- 
wontedly, — the first, delicious, strange feeling of 
national life. 

Twice within a century men have heard that elo- 
quence. They heard it once when, in 1782, Ireland, 
in arms, had extorted — in part from the humiliation 
and necessities of England, in part from the justice of 
a new administration — the independence of her par- 
liament and her judiciary, 

" That one lucid interval snatched from the gloom 

And the madness of ages, when filled with one soul, 
A nation o'erleaped the dark bounds of her doom, 
And for one sacred instant touched liberty's goal," — 

and Mr. Grattan, rising slowly in her House of Com- 
mons, said : "I am now to address a free people ; 
ages have passed away, and this is the first moment 



196 THE ELOQUENCE OF 

in which you could be distinguished by that appella- 
tion. I found Ireland on her knees ; I Avatched over 
lier with an eternal solicitude. I have traced her 
progress from injuries to arms, from arms to liberty. 
Spirit of Swift, spirit of Molyneux, your genius has 
prevailed ! Ireland is now a nation. In that char- 
acter, I hail her ; and, bowing to her august presence, 
I say, Live Forever ! " 

Men heard that eloquence in 1776, in that manifold 
and mighty appeal by the genius and wisdom of that 
ncAv America, to persuade the people to take on the 
name of nation, and begin its life. By how many 
pens and tongues that great pleading was conducted ; 
through how many months, before the date of the 
actual Declaration, it went on, day after day ; in how 
many forms, before how many assemblies, from the 
village newspaper, the more careful pamphlet, the 
private conversation, the town-meeting, the legisla- 
tive bodies of particular colonies, up to the Hall oi 
the immortal old Congress, and the master intelli 
gences of lion heart and eagle eye, that ennobled it, — 
all this you know. But the leader in that great 
argument was John Adams, of Massachusetts. He, 
by concession of all men, was the orator of that rev- 
olution, — the revolution in which a nation was born. 
Other and renoAvned names, by written or spoken 
eloquence, cooperated effectively, splendidly, to the 
grand result, — Samuel Adams, Samuel Chase, Jeffer- 
son, Henry, James Otis in an earlier stage. Each of 
these, and a hundred more, within circles of influence 
wider or narrower, sent forth, scattering broadcast, 
the seed of life in the ready, virgin soil. Each brought 
some specialty of gift to the work : Jefferson, the 



REVOLUTIONAKY PERIODS. 197 

magic of style, and the liabit and the power of deli- 
cious dalliance with those large, fair ideas of freedom 
and equality, so dear to man, so irresistible in that 
day ; Henr}^, the indescribable and lost spell of the 
speech of the emotions, which fills the eye, chills the 
blood, turns the cheelv pale, — the lyric phase of elo- 
quence, the "fire-water," as Lamartine has said, of 
the revolution, instilling into the sense and the soul 
the sw^eet madness of battle ; Samuel Chase, the tones 
of anger, confidence, and pride, and the art to inspire 
them. John Adams's eloquence alone seemed to have 
met every demand of the time ; as a question of right, 
as a question of prudence, as a question of immediate 
opportunity, as a question of feeling, as a question of 
conscience, as a question of historical and durable and 
innocent glory, he knew it all, through and through ; 
and in that mighty debate, which, beginning in Con- 
gress as far back as March or February, 1776, had its 
close on the second and on tlie fourth of July, he 
presented it in all its aspects, to every passion and 
affection, — to the burning sense of wrong, exas- 
perated at length beyond control by the shedding of 
blood ; to grief, anger, self-respect ; to the desire of 
happiness and of safety ; to the sense of moral obliga- 
tion, commanding that the duties of life are more 
than life ; to courage, which fears God, and knows no 
other fear ; to the craving of the colonial heart, of all 
hearts, for the reality and the ideal of country, and 
which cannot be filled unless the dear native land 
comes to be breathed on by the grace, clad in the 
robes, armed with the thunders, admitted an equal 
to the assembly, of the nations ; to that large and 
heroical ambition which would build States, that 



198 THE ELOQUENCE OF 

imperial philanthropy wliich would open to liberty 
an asylum here, and give to the sick heart, hard fare, 
fettered conscience of the children of the Old World, 
healing, plenty, and freedom to worship God, — to 
these passions, and these ideas, he presented the ap- 
peal for months, day after day, until, on the third of 
July, 1776, he could record the result, writing thus 
to bis wife : " Yesterday, the greatest question was 
decided which ever was debated in America ; and 
a greater, perhaps, never was, nor will be, among 
men." 

Of that series of spoken eloquence all is perished ; 
not one reported sentence has come down to us. The 
voice through which the rising spirit of a young 
nation sounded out its dream of life is hushed. The 
great spokesman, of an age unto an age, is dead. 

And yet of those lost words is not our whole 
America one immortal record and reporter ? Do ^^e 
not read them, deep cut, defying the tooth of time, 
on all the marble of our greatness? How they blaze 
on the pillars of our Union ! How is their deep 
sense unfolded and interpreted by every passing 
hour ! how do they come to life, and grow audible, as 
it were, in the brightening rays of the light he fore- 
saw, as the fabled invisible harp gave out its music to 
the morning ! 

Yes, in one sense, they are perished. No parch- 
ment manuscript, no embalming printed page, no 
certain traditions of living or dead, have kept them. 
Yet, from out, and from off, all things around us, — 
our laughing harvests, our songs of labor, our com- 
merce on all the seas, our secure homes, our school- 
houses and churches, our happy people, our radiant 



REVOLUTIONARY PERIODS. 199 

and stainless flag, — how they come pealing, pealing, 
Independence now, and Independence for ever ! 

And now, on a review of this series of the most 
eloquent of the eloquent, and of these opportunities 
of their renown, does our love deceive us, or have we 
not ourselves seen and heard, and followed mourning 
to the grave, one man, who, called to act in a time 
so troubled and high, would have enacted a part of 
equal splendor, and won a fame as historical ? Our 
Webster — was there ever yet a cause to be pleaded 
to an assembly of men on earth to which he would 
not have apj)roved himself equal? Consider that 
he was cast on a quiet, civil age, an age, a land, of 
order, of law, of contentment, of art, of progress 
by natural growth, of beautiful and healthful ma- 
terial prosperity, resting on an achieved and stable 
freedom. We saw that ocean only in its calm. But 
what if the stern north-east had blown on that 
ocean, or the hurricane of the tropics had vexed its 
unsounded depths ? That mighty reason, that sover- 
eign brow and eye, that majestic port, that fountain 
of eloquent feeling, of passion, of imagination, — 
which seems to me to have been in him never com- 
pletely opened, fathomless as a sea, and like that 
demanding the breaking up of the monsoon, or the 
attraction of those vast bodies the Lights of the world, 
to give it to flow, rise, and ebb, — what triumph of 
eloquence the ages ever witnessed was beyond those 
marvellous faculties, in their utmost excitement, to 
achieve ? 

Assisted by that unequalled organ of speech, the 
Greek language of Demosthenes, might he not have 
rolled an equal thunder, and darted an equal flame ? — 



200 THE ELOQUENCE OF 

might he not have breathed virtue into the decay of 
Greece, and turned back for a space the inevitable 
hour? 

The shaken pillars of the old constitution of Roman 
liberty, the old grand traditions dishonored, the dig- 
nity of the senate, the privilege of the people assailed, 

— would not their last great champion have acknowl- 
edged in him an ally worthy of the glorious, falling 
cause? 

And when the transcendent question of our Inde- 
pendence was to be debated, was he not the very man 
to stand by Adams, and second the motion which has 
made the illustrious mover immortal? The rights of 
the colonies in point of law on their charters ; the 
violations of these rights ; the larger rights of man, 

— the right to liberty and the pursuit of happiness ; 
the right — the conditions, the occasions, of the right 
— to the national life, — would not he, too, have set 
these to view transparent, exact, clear as a sunbeam? 
When reason has convinced, and conscience has in- 
structed, would not that hand, too, have swept with 
as all-commanding power the chords of the greater 
passions, — grief, indignation, pride, hope, self-sacri- 
fice, — whose music is at once the inspirer and the 
utterance of the sublimest moments of history, through 
which the first voices of the sense and the love of 
country are breathed ? 

And then, as the vision of independent America 
gleamed through the future, would he not already, 
with a soul as trustful, a trumpet-tone as confident, a 
voice of prophecy as sure as on that later, festal day, 
from the Rock of the Pilgrims, bid the distant gener- 
ations hail? And jet^ in that want of grandest 



REVOLUTIONARY PERIODS. 201 

opportunities for the effort of his powers, had he large 
comj)ensation, happier, nor less glorious, when he 
rose and shone and set on that unclouded sky, and on 
that wide, deep calm of moral nature, than in soaring, 
as he would have soared, on all its storms, and wield- 
ing, as he would have wielded, all its thunders. 



202 DEDICATION OF THE 



ADDRESS 



DELIVERED IN SOUTH DANVERS, AT THE DEDICATION OF 
THE PEABODY INSTITUTE, SEPTEMBER 29, 1854. 



I ESTEEM it a great privilege to have been allowed 
to unite with my former townsmen, and the friends 
of so many years, — by whose seasonable kindness 
the earliest struggles of my professional life were 
observed and helped, — the friends of all its periods, 
— so I have found them, — to unite with you in the 
transaction for which we are assembled. In all re- 
spects it is one of rare interest. You have come 
together to express anew your appreciation of the 
character and the objects of the giver of this sj^lendid 
charity, to repeat and republish your grateful accept- 
ance of it, and to dedicate this commodious and 
beautiful structure to its faithful and permanent 
administration. You open to-day for Dan vers — its 
inhabitants of this time, and all its successions — the 
Lyceum of knowledge and morality. Under this 
dedication it shall stand while Massachusetts shall 
stand. This edifice will crumble, certainly, to be 
replaced with another ; this generation of the first 
recipients of the gift, — the excellent giver himself, — 
will soon pass away ; but while our social and civil 
system shall endure ; w^hile law shall be administered ; 
while the sentiments of justice, gratitude, and honor, 



I'EABODY INSTITUTE. 203 

shall beat in one heart on jour territory, the charity 
is immortal. 

For every one among you it is set open equally. 
No fear that the religious opinions he holds sacred 
will be assailed, or the politics he cultivates insulted, 
will keep back any from his share of the diffusive 
good. Other places and other occasions you reserve 
for dissent and disputation, and struggle for mastery, 
and the sharp competitions of life. But here shall 
be peace and reconciliation. Within these walls, the 
knowledge and the morality, which ai-^ of no creed 
and no party ; which are graceful and profitable for 
all alike, — of every creed and every party ; which 
are true and real to every mind, as mind, and from 
the nature of mind, — and to every conscience, as 
conscience, and from the nature of conscience ; and 
which are the same thing, therefore, in every brain 
and every heart, — this alone, — knowledge and 
morality, broad, free, as humanity itself, — is to be 
inculcated here. 

Happy and privileged the community, beyond the 
measure of New England privilege even, for whom 
such hiofh educational instrumentalities are thus 
munificently provided, and made perpetual ! Happy 
especially, if they shall rouse themselves to improve 
them to their utmost capacity, — if they shall feel 
that they are summoned by a new motive, and by an 
obligation unfelt before, to an unaccustomed effort 
to appropriate to their hearts and their reason all 
the countless good which is hidden in knowledge 
and a rio^ht life, — an effort to become — more than 
before — wise, bright, thoughtful, ingenious, good ; to 
attain to the highest degree of learning which is com- 



204 DEDICATION OF THE 

patible with the practical system of things of which 
they are part ; to feed the immortal, spiritual nature 
with an ampler and higher nutrition, enriching 
memory with new facts, judgment with sounder 
thoughts, taste with more beautiful images, the moral 
sense with more of all things whatsoever they are 
lovely, honest, and of good report, — the reality of 
virtue, the desert of praise. 

Happy, almost, above all, the noble giver, whose 
heart is large enough to pay, of the abundance which 
crowns his life, — to pay out of his single means, — 
the whole debt this generation owes the future. I 
honor and love him, not merely that his energy, 
sense, and integrity have raised him from a poor boy 
— waiting in that shop yonder — to spread a table 
for the entertainment of princes, — not merely be- 
cause the brilliant professional career which has given 
him a position so commanding in the mercantile and 
social circles of the commercial capital of the world 
has left him as completely American — the heart as 
wholly untravelled — as when he first stepped on the 
shore of England to seek his fortune, sighing to think 
that the ocean rolled between him and home ; jealous 
of honor ; wakeful to our interests ; helping his coun- 
try, not by swagger and vulgarity, but by recommend- 
ing her credit ; vindicating her title to be trusted on 
the exchange of nations ; squandering himself in hos- 
pitalities to her citizens — a man of deeds, not of 
words, — not for these merely I love and honor him, 
but because his nature is affectionate and unsophisti- 
cated still ; because his memory comes over so lovingly 
to this sweet Argos, to the schoolroom of his child- 
hood, to the old shop and kind master, and the graves 



PEABODY INSTITUTE. 205 

of his father and mother ; and because he has had 
the sagacity, and the character to indulge these un- 
extinguished affections in a gift, not of vanity and 
ostentation, but of supreme and durable utility. 

I have found it quite incompatible with my en- 
gagements and health to methodize the thoughts 
which have crowded on my mind in the prospect of 
meeting you to-day, into any thing like elaborate or 
extended discourse ; but I have certainly wished, — 
instead of mere topics of congratulation ; or instead 
of diffusing myself exclusively on the easy and obvi- 
ous commonplaces of the utility of knowledge, and 
the beauty of virtue ; or instead of the mere indul- 
gence of those trains of memory and sensibility, to 
which the spectacle of old friends, and of the chil- 
dren and grandchildren of other friends, " whom my 
dim eyes in vain ex^^lore,'* almost irrepressively im- 
pels me, — instead of this, to submit a practical sug- 
gestion or two in regard to the true modes of turning 
the Lyceum to its utmost account ; and, then, in 
regard to the motives you are under to do so. These 
suggestions I make diffidently ; and, therefore, I 
would not make them at all, but from the conviction 
that in your hands they may come to assume some 
little value. 

I take it for granted that the declared wishes of 
Mr. Peabody will be considered as determining, quite 
peremptorily, the general mode of administering this 
fund. Better educational instrumentalities, indeed, 
no man's wisdom, in the circumstances, could have 
devised. Courses of lectures, then, and a library of 
good books, these are to form the means of the Ly- 
ceum ; and the problem is, in what way can you 
make the most of them. 



206 DEDICATION OF THE 

It may seem a little exaggerated at its first state- 
ment, and perhaps alarming, but it will serve at least 
to introduce my more particular ideas, to say that 
the true vieiv for you to take of this large provision of 
mental means^ and of your relations to it, is to regard 
yourselves as having become hy its bestoivment perma- 
nently the members of an institution ivhich undertakes 
to teach you by lectures and a library. Herein exactly 
is the peculiarity of your new privilege. You are no 
longer, as heretofore it has been with you, merely to 
be indulged the opportunity of a few evenings in a 
year to listen, for the amusement of it, to half a dozen 
discourses of as many different speakers, on as many 
totally disconnected topics, treated possibly for osten- 
tation, and adapted only to entertain, — but, however 
treated, and whatever fit for, totally forgotten in an 
hour; preceded, followed up, and assisted, b}^ no 
preparation and no effort of the hearer ; giving no 
direction whatever to his thoughts or readings ; sepa- 
rated from each other, even while the lyceum season 
lasts, by a week of labor, devoted, even in its leisure 
moments, to trains of thought or snatches of reading 
wholly unauxiliar and irrelative, and for nine months 
or ten months of the year totally discontinued. 
Thanks to this munificence, you are come to the frui- 
tion of far other opportunities. An institution of 
learning, in the justest sense of the term, is provided 
for you. Lectures are to be delivered for you through 
a far larger portion of the year ; a library, which will 
assuredly swell to thousands of volumes, is to be 
accumulated under your eye, from which you may 
derive the means of accompanying any lecturer on 
any subject from evening to evening ; and this sys- 



PEABODY INSTITUTE. 207 

tern of provision is permanent, — henceforth part and 
parcel, through its corporate existence, of the civil 
identity and privilege of Danvers. Yon enter, there- 
fore, to-da}^ — you maj^ enter — a new and important 
school ; as durably such, as truly such, — having 
reo'ard to differences of circumstantial details, — as 
the Seminary at Andover, or the LaAv School at Cam- 
bridge, or the College of Medicine at Philadelphia, — 
all of them schools, too, and all teaching by lectures 
and a library. 

Setting out with this idea, let me sa}^ a word on 
the lectures of this school, — what they should be, 
and how they should be heard, assisted, and turned 
to account by those who hear them. And I submit 
to the trustees of the charity to reflect, whether a 
succession of such discourses as I have indicated, on 
disconnected topics, by different speakers, — however 
brilliant and able the individual performer may be, — 
will, in the long run, yield the good, or any approxi- 
mation to the good, which would be derived from 
courses of lectures more or less extended, like the 
Lowell Lectures of Boston, each by a single person, 
devoted to the more exact and thorough treatment of 
a single important subject. 

Consider that the diffusion of knowledge among 
you is the aim of the founder. The imparting of 
knowledgre is the task which he sets his lecturer to 
do ; and of knowledge in any proper sense, — knowl- 
edge within the legal meaning of this charity, — how 
much can he impart who comes once in a year, once 
in a lifetime, perhaps, before his audience, a stranger, 
addresses it an hour, and goes his way? He can 
teach little, if he tries ; and the chances are infinite, 



208 DEDICATION OF THE 

that to teach that little he will not tr}'. The tempta- 
tions and the tendencies of that system of exhibition 
are irresistible, to make him despair of conveying 
knowledge, and devote himself to producing effect ; 
to select some topic mainly of emotional or imagina- 
tive capability ; and even then to sacrifice the beauty 
which is in truth to the counterfeit presentment which 
mocks it in glitter, exaggeration, ingenuity, and in- 
tensity. If he would spend his hour in picking up 
and explaining a shell or pebble from the shore of the 
ocean of knowledge, it were something ; but that 
seems unworthy of himself, and of the ex23ectations 
which await him, and up he soars, or down he sinks, 
to rhetoric or bathos ; and when his little part is best 
discharged, it is not much more than the lovely song 
of one who hath a pleasant voice, and can play well 
upon an instrument. 

I do not say that such lectures are hurtful. I do 
not deny them a certain capacity of usefulness. I do 
not say they are not all which you should look for in 
our lyceums, as ordinarily they are constituted. They 
are all which, for the present, you will yourselves, 
perhaps, be able to provide. But to an endowed and 
durable foundation like this, they are totally inappli- 
cable. They would be no more nor less, after you 
shall be completely organized, than a gross abuse of 
the charity, and violation of the will, of the giver. 
It is not merely that they would teach no knowledge, 
and would not assume to do it, and that the nature 
and laws of that kind of composition, and the con- 
ditions of its existence, totally exclude such a func- 
tion. It goes further than that. The relations 
between teacher and pupil, under such a system, 



PEABODY INSTITUTE. 209 

never exist at all. The audience never think of 
coming before the lecturer to have the truths of the 
last lecture retouched, and new ones deduced or 
added ; to have the difficulties, of which they have 
been thinking since they heard him before, resolved ; 
to ask questions ; to be advised what authors to read, 
or what experiments to undertake, on the subject he 
is illustrating. They carry no part of his sermon 
into the week with them ; and he never knows or 
asks whether they do or not. In the nature of thing's, 
this all must be so. It is of the essential conception 
of knowledge, as the founder here usfes the word, — 
knowledge as applicable to any thing, — that it in- 
cludes many particulars of fact or idea, arranged 
by method, that is, arranged according to their true 
relations. 

Whatever it be on which knowledge is to be im- 
parted, — whether one of the phenomena of nature, 
as vegetable life, or insensible motion, or the periods 
of the stars ; or some great aspect of humanity, as 
the history of a renowned age or event, pregnant of a 
stupendous future, or a marked man of the heroic and 
representative type ; or one of the glorious produc- 
tions of mind, as a constitution of free government, 
or a union of States into one nationality, a great lit- 
erature, or even a great poem, — whatever it be, that 
which makes up the consummate knowledge of it is 
at, once so much a unity and an infinity, — it unfolds 
itself into so many particulars, one deduced from 
another by series ever progressive, one modifying 
another, every one requiring to be known in order 
that any one may be exactly known, — that if you 
mean to teach it by lectures at all, you must substi- 

14 



210 DEDICATION OF THE 

tute a totally different system. It must he done hy 
courses continuously delivered^ and frequently^ hy the 
same person^ and having for their ohj ect to achieve the 
exact and exhaustive treatment of something^ — some 
science, some art, some age, some transaction, that 
changed the face of fortune and history, — something 
worthy to be completely known. He whom you call 
to labor on this foundation must understand that it 
is knowledge which is demanded of him. He must 
assure himself that he is to have his full time to im- 
part it. He must come to the work, appreciating 
that he is not to be judged by the brilliancy or dul- 
ness of one passage, or one evening ; but that he 
must stand or fall by the mass and aggregate of his 
teachings. He is to feel that he is an instructor, not 
the player of a part on a stage ; that he is to teach 
truth, and not cut a rhetorical caper ; enthusiastic in 
the pursuit, exact and veracious as a witness under 
oath in the announcement. I would have him able 
to say of the subject which he treats, what Cousin 
said of philosophy in the commencement of one of 
his celebrated courses, after a long interruption by 
the instability of the government of France : " De- 
voted entirely to it, after having had the honor to 
suffer a little in its service^ I come to coiisecrate to its 
illustration^ unreservedly^ all that remains to me of 
strength and of life." 

And, now, how are you to hear such courses of 
lectures? Essentially by placing yourselves in the 
relation of pupils to the lecturer. For the whole 
period of his course, let the subject he teaches compose 
the study of the hours, or fragments of hours which 
you give to study at all. You would read something, 



I 



PEABODY INSTITUTE. 211 

on some topic, every day, in all events. Let that 
reading, less or more, relate exclusively or mainly to 
the department of knowledge on which you go to 
hear him. If he knows his business, he will recom- 
mend all the best books pertaining to that depart- 
ment, and on these the first purchases for the Library 
will be quite likely in part to be expended. Attend 
the instructions of his lips by the instruction of the 
printed treatise. In this way only can you, by any 
possibility, avail yourselves at once of all that books 
and teachers can do. In this way only can you make 
one cooperate with the other. In this way only — in 
a larger view — can you rationally count on consider- 
able and ever-increasing acquisitions of knowledge. 
Remember that your opportunities for such attain- 
ments in this school, after all, are to be few and brief. 
You and I are children of labor at last. The prac- 
tical, importunate, ever-recurring duties of the calling 
to which we are assigned must have our best of life. 
What are your vacations, or mine, from work, for the 
still air of delightful studies ? They are only divers 
infinitely minute particles of time, — half-hours before 
the morning or mid-day meal is quite ready, — days, 
now and then, not sick enough for the physician nor 
well enough for work, — a rainy afternoon, — the 
priceless evening, when the long task is done, — these 
snatches and interstitial spaces, — moments literal 
and fleet, — these are all the chances that we can bor- 
row or create for the luxury of learning. How diffi- 
cult it is to arrest these moments, to aggregate them, 
to till them, as it were, to make them day by day 
extend our knowledge, refine our tastes, accomplish 
our whole culture, to scatter in them the seed that 



212 DEDICATION OF THE 

shall grow up, as Jeremy Taylor has said, '' to crowns 
and sceptres" of a true wisdom, — how difficult is 
this we all appreciate. To turn them to any profit at 
all, we must religiously methodize them. Desultory 
reading and desultory reverie are to be for ever aban- 
doned. A page in this book, and another in that, — 
ten minutes' thought or conversation on this subject, 
and the next ten on that, — this strenuous and spe- 
cious idleness is not the way by which our intervals 
of labor are to open to us the portals of the crystal 
palace of truth. Such reading, too, and such think- 
ing are an indulgence by which the mind loses its 
power, — by which curiosity becomes sated, ennui 
supervenes, and the love of learning itself is irrev- 
ocably lost. Therefore, I say, methodize your mo- 
ments. Let your reading be systematic ever, so 
that every interval of rest shall have its book pro- 
vided for it ; and during the courses of your lectures, 
let those books treat the topics of the course. 

Let me illustrate my meaning. You are attending, 
I will say, a course on astronomy, consisting of two 
lectures in a week, for two months. Why should you 
not regard yourselves for these two months as stu- 
dents of astronomy, so far as you can study any thing, 
or think of any thing, outside of your business ; and 
why not determine to know nothing else ; but to know 
as much of that as you can, for all that time ? Con- 
sider what this would involve, and what it might 
accomplish. Suppose that you, by strenuous and 
persistent effort, hold that one subject fully in view 
for so long a period ; that you do your utmost to turn 
your thouglits and conversation on it ; that you write 
out the lecture, from notes or memory, as soon as it is 



PEABODY INSTITUTE. 213 

given, and reperuse and master it before you hear the 
next ; that you read, not on other parts of the science, 
but on the very parts wliich the lecturer has arrived 
at and is discussing ; that you devote an hour each 
evening to surveying^ the architecture of the heavens 
for yourselves, seeking to learn, not merely to indulge 
a vague and wandering sort of curiosity, or even a 
grand, but indistinct and general emotion, as if listen- 
ing to imaginary music of spheres, but to aspire to 
the science of the stars, to fix their names, to group 
them in classes and constellations, to trace their paths, 
their reciprocal influence, their courses everlasting, — 
suppose that thus, and by voluntary continuous ex- 
ertion, you concentrate on one great subject, for so 
considerable a period, all the moments of time and 
snatches of hasty reading and opportunities of thought 
that otherwise would have wasted themselves every- 
where, and gone off by insensible evaporation, — do 
you not believe that it would tell decisively upon 
your mental culture and your positive attainments ? 
Would not the effort of attention so prolonged and 
exclusive be a discipline itself inestimable? Would 
not the particulars of so much well-systematized read- 
ing and thought arrange themselves in your minds in 
the form of science, — harder to forget than to re- 
member? and might you not hope to begin to feel the 
delicious sensations implied in growing consciously in 
the knowledge of truth ? 

I have taken for granted, in these thoughts on the 
best mode of administering the charity, that your 
own earnest purpose will be to turn it, by some mode, 
to its utmost account. The gratitude and alacrity 
with which you accepted the gift show quite well 



214 DEDICATION OF THE 

how you appreciate the chiims of knowledge and the 
dignity of mental culture, and what value you set 
upon this rare and remarkable appropriation to uses 
so lofty. I have no need, therefore, to exhort you to 
profit of these opportunities ; but there are one or 
two views on which I have formerly reflected some- 
what, and which I will briefly lay before you. 

It is quite common to say, and much more common 
to think, without saying it aloud, that mental culture 
and learning, above the elem.ents, may well claim a 
high place, as luxuries and indulgence, and even a 
grand utility, for those whose condition allows them 
a lifetime for such luxury and such indulgence, and 
the appropriation of such a good ; but that for labor 
— properly so called — they can do little, even if 
labor could pause to acquire them. Not so has the 
founder of this charity reasoned; nor so will you. 
He would say, and so do I, — Seek for mental power, 
and the utmost practicable love and measure of knowl- 
edge, exactl}^ because they will do so much for labor ; 
first, to inform and direct its exertions ; secondh', to 
refine and adorn it, and disengage it from too absolute 
an immersion in matter, and biing it into relation to 
the region of ideas and spirituality and abstraction ; 
and, thirdly, to soothe its fatigues and relieve its 
burdens and compose its discontent. 

True is it, of all our power, eminence, and consid- 
eration, as of our existence, that the condition is labor. 
Our lot is labor. There is no reversal of the doom 
of man for us. But is tliat a reason why we should 
not aspire to the love and attainment of learning, and 
to the bettering of the mind ? For that yery reason 
we should do so. Does not the industry of a people 



I 



PEABODY INSTITUTE. 215 

at last rest upon and embody the intellect of the 
people? Is not its industry as its intellect? 

I say, then, forasmuch as we are children of labor, 
cultivate mental poAver. Pointing tlie friends of hu- 
manity, and of America, to this charity, I say to 
them, go and do likewise. Diffuse mental power. 
Give it to more than have it now. Give it in a hio'her 

e O 

degree. Give it in earlier life. Think how stupen- 
dous, yet how practicable it were to make, by an 
improved popular culture, the entire laborious masses 
of New England more ingenious, more inventive, 
more prudent than now they are. How much were 
effected, — how much for power; how much for en- 
joyment ; how much for a true glory, — by this acces- 
sion to the quality of its mind. It would show itself 
in half a century in every acre of her surface. In 
the time it would save, in the strength it would im- 
part, in the waste it would prevent, in the more 
sedulous husbandry of all the gifts of God, in richer 
soils, created or opened ; in the great cooperating 
forces of nature — air, water, steam, fertility — yoked 
in completer obedience to the car of labor ; in the 
multiplicity of useful inventions, those unfailing 
exponents, as well as promoters, of popular mental 
activity and reach ; in the aggregate of j)roduction, 
swelled, diversified, enriched ; in the refluent wave 
of wealth, subsiding here and there in reservoirs, in 
lakes, in springs perennial, but spread, too, every- 
where in rills and streamlets, and falling in the de- 
scent of dew and the dropping of the cloud, — in 
these things you would see the peaceful triumphs of 
an improved mind. Nor in these alone, or chiefly. 
More beautiful far, and more precious, would they 



216 DEDICATION OF THE 

beam abroad in the elevation of the standard of com- 
fortable life ; in the heightened sense of individual 
responsibility and respectability^ and a comj)leter 
individual development ; in happier homes ; in better 
appreciation of the sacredness of property, and the 
sovereignty of justice in the form of law ; in more 
time found and better prized, when the tasks of the 
day were all well done, — more time found and better 
prized for the higher necessities of the intellect and 
soul. 

I have not time to dwell now on the second reason, 
by which I suggested that labor should be persuaded 
to seek knowledge, though it would well deserve a 
fuller handling. You find that reason in the ten- 
dency of culture and learning to refine the work-day 
life, and adorn it ; to disengage it from the contacts 
of matter, and elevate it to the sphere of ideas and 
abstraction and spirituality ; to withdraw, as Dr. 
Johnson has said, — " to withdraw us from the power 
of our senses ; to make the past, the distant, or the 
future predominate over the present, and thus to ad- 
vance us in the dignity of thinking beings." Surely 
we need not add a self-inflicted curse to that which 
punished the fall. To earn our bread in the sweat 
of our brow is ordained to us certainly ; but not, 
therefore, to forget in whose image we were made, 
nor to suffer all beams of the original brightness to 
go out. Who has doomed us, or any of us, to labor 
so exclusive and austere, that only half, the lower 
half, of our nature can survive it ? The unrest of 
avarice, or ambition, or vanity, may do it ; but no 
necessity of our being, and no appointment of its 
author. Shall we, of our own election, abase our- 



1 



PEABODY INSTITUTE. 217 

selves? Do you feel that the mere tasks of daily 
labor ever employ the whole man ? Have you not a 
conscious nature, other and beside that which tills the 
earth, drives the plane, squares the stone, creates the 
fabric of art, — a nature intellectual, spiritual, moral, 
capacious of science, capacious of truth beyond the 
sphere of sense, with large discourse of reason, look- 
ing before and after, and taking hold on that within 
the veil ? 

What forbids that this nature shall have its daily 
bread also day by day ? What forbids that it have 
time to nourish its sympathy with all kindred- human 
blood, by studying the grand facts of universal his- 
tory ; to learn to look beyond the chaotic flux and 
reflux of mere appearances, which are the outside of 
the world around it, into their scientific relations and 
essential quality ; to soar from effects to causes, and 
' through causes to the first ; to begin to recognize 
and to love, here and now, in waning moon or star of 
evening, or song of solemn bird, or fall of water, or 
*' self-born carol of infancy," or transcendent land- 
scape, or glorious self-sacrifice — to begin to recog- 
nize and love in these that beauty here which shall be 
its dwelling-place and its vesture in the life to come ; 
to accustom itself to discern, in all vicissitudes of 
things, the changed and falling leaf, the golden har- 
vest, the angry sigh of November's wind, the storm 
of snow, the temporary death of nature, the opening 
of the chambers of the South, and the unresting 
round of seasons — to discern not merely the sublime 
circle of eternal change, but the unfailing law, flow- 
ing from the infinite Mind, and the " varied God " — 
filling and moving, and in all things, yet personal and 
apart ! What forbids it to cultivate and confirm 



218 DEDICATION OF THE 

" The glorious habit by which sense is made 
Subservient still to moral purposes, 
Auxiliar to divine " ? 

What forbids that it grow 

" Accustomed to desires tliat feed 
On fruitage gatliered from tlie Tree of Life " ? 

I do not sa}^ that every man, even in a condition 
of competence, can exemplify this nobler culture and 
this rarer knowledge. But I will say that the exac- 
tions of labor do not hinder it. Recall a familiar, 
though splendid and remarkable instance or two. 

Burns reaped as much and as well as the duller 
companion by his side, and meantime was conceiving 
an immortal song of Scotland ; and Hugh Miller was 
just as painstaking a stone-mason and as good a 
workman as if he had not so husbanded his spare 
half-hours and moments as to become, while an ap- 
prentice and journeyman, a profound geologist and 
master of a clear and charming English style. But 
how much more a man was the poet and the geolo- 
gist ; how far fuller the consciousness of being ; how 
much larger the daily draught of that admiration, 
hope, and love, which are the life and voice of 
souls ! 

I come to add the final reason why the working 
man, by whom I mean the whole brotherhood of in- 
dustry, should set on mental culture and that knowl- 
edge which is wisdom a value so high — only not 
supreme — subordinate alone to the exercises and 
hopes of religion itself. And that is, that therein 
he shall so surely find rest from labor ; succor under 
its burdens ; forgetfulness of its cares, composure in 
its annoyances. It is not always that the busy day 



PEABODY INSTITUTE. 219 

is followed by the peaceful night. It is not always 
that fatigue wins sleep. Often some vexation out- 
side of the toil that has exhausted the frame, some 
loss in a bargain, some loss by an insolvency, some 
unforeseen rise or fall of prices, some triumph of a 
mean or fraudulent competitor, 

" The oppressor's wrong, the proud man's contumely, 
The pangs of despised love, the law's delay, 
The insolence of office, and the spurns 
That patient merit of the unworthy takes," 

some self-reproach, perhaps, follow you within the 
door, chill the fireside, sow the pillow with thorns, and 
the dark care is last in the last waking thought, and 
haunts the vivid dream. Hapj^y, then, is he who has 
laid up in youth, and held fast in all fortune, a genu- 
ine and passionate love of reading. True balm of 
hurt minds ; of surer and more healthful charm than 
" poppy or mandragora, or all the drowsy syrups of 
the world," by that single taste, — by that single ca- 
pacity, he may bound in a moment into the still region 
of delightful studies, and be at rest. He recalls the 
annoyance that pursues him ; reflects that he has 
done all that might become a man to avoid or bear 
it ; he indulges in one good, long, human sigh, picks 
up the volume where the mark kept his place,- and in 
about the same time that it takes the Mahometan in 
the Spectator to put his head in the bucket of water, 
and raise it out, he finds himself exploring the arrow- 
marked ruins of Nineveh with Layard ; or worship- 
ping at the spring-head of the stupendous Missouri, 
with Clark and Lewis ; or watching with Columbus 
for the sublime moment of the rising of the curtain 
from before the great mystery of the sea ; or looking 



220 DEDICATION OF THE 

reverentially on while Socrates — the discourse of 
immortality ended — refuses the offer of escape, and 
takes in his hand the poison, to die in obedience to 
the unrighteous sentence of the law ; or, perhaps, it 
is in the contemplation of some vast spectacle or phe- 
nomenon of nature that he has found his quick peace 

— the renewed exploration of one of her great laws 

— or some glimpse opened by the pencil of St. Pierre, 
or Humboldt, or Chateaubriand, or Wilson, of the 
" blessedness and glory of her own deep, calm, and 
mighty existence." 

Let the case of a busy lawyer testify to the priceless 
value of the love of reading. He comes home, his 
temples throbbing, his nerves shattered, from a trial of 
a week ; surprised and alarmed by the charge of the 
judge, and pale with anxiety about the verdict of the 
next morning, not at all satisfied with what he has done 
himself, though he does not yet see how he could 
have improved it ; recalling with dread and self- 
disparagement, if not with envy, the brilliant effort 
of his antagonist, and tormenting himself with the 
vain wish that he could have replied to it — and alto- 
gether a very miserable subject, and in as unfavora- 
ble a condition to accept comfort from wife and 
children as poor Christian in the first three pages of 
the Pilgrim's Progress. Witli a superhuman effort 
he opens his book, and in the twinkling of an eye he 
is looking into the full " orb of Homeric or Miltonic 
song," or he stands in the crowd — breathless, yet 
swayed as forests or the sea by winds — hearing and 
to judge the Pleadings for the Crown ; or the philos- 
ophy which soothed Cicero or Boethius in their afflic- 
tions, in exile, prison, and the contemplation of death, 



PEABODY INSTITUTE. 221 

breathes over his petty cares like the sweet south ; or 
Pope or Horace hiughs him into good humor ; or he 
walks with ^neas and the Sibyl in the mild light of 
the world of the laurelled dead ; and the court-house 
is as completely forgotten as the dreams of a pre- 
adamite life. Well may he prize that endeared charm, 
so effectual and safe, without which the brain had 
long ago been chilled by paralysis, or set on fire of 
insanity ! 

To these uses and these enjoyments, to mental 
culture and knowledge and morality, the guide, the 
grace, the solace of labor on all his fields, we dedicate 
this charity ! May it bless you in all your succes- 
sions! and may the admirable giver survive to see 
that the debt which he recognizes to the future is 
completely discharged; survive to enjoy in the grati- 
tude and love and honor of this generation, the honor 
and love and gratitude with which the latest will 
assuredly cherish his name, and partake and transmit 
his benefaction ! 



222 REMARKS ON THE 



REMARKS BEFORE THE CIRCUIT COURT 
ON THE DEATH OF MR. WEBSTER. 



[Mr. Webster died on Sunday morning, October 24, 1852. 
The members of the Suffolk Bar met on Monday morning, and 
appointed a committee to report a series of resolutions. These 
were read and adopted at an adjourned meeting, Thursday^ 
October 28th, and immediately presented to the Circuit Court 
of the United States for the District of Massachusetts, Curtis 
and Sprague, Justices on the Bench. They were read by the 
Hon. George S. Hillard, after which Mr. Choate made the 
following remarks:] 

May it please your Honors : — 

I HAVE been requested by the members of the 
Bar of this Court to add a few words to the resolu- 
tions just read, in which they have embodied, as they 
were able, their sorrow for the death of their beloved 
and illustrious member and countryman, Mr. Web- 
ster ; their estimation of his character, life, and gen- 
ius ; their sense of the bereavement, — to the country 
as to his friends, — incapable of repair ; the pride, 
the fondness, — the filial and the patriotic pride and 
fondness, — with which they cherish, and would con- 
sign to history to cherish, the memory of a great and 
good man. 

And yet I could earnestly have desired to be ex- 
cused from this duty. He must have known Mr. 
Webster less, and loved him less, than your honors 



DEATH OF MR. WEBSTER. 223 

or than I have known and loved him, who can quite 
yet, — quite 'j^et, — before we can comprehend that 
we have lost him for ever, — before the first paleness 
with which the news of his death overspread our 
cheeks has passed away, — before we have been down 
to lay him in the Pilgrim soil he loved so well, till 
the heavens be no more, — he must have known and 
loved him less than we have done, who can como 
here quite yet, to recount the series of his service, to 
display with psychological exactness the traits of his 
nature and mind, to ponder and speculate on the 
secrets — on the marvellous secrets — and source of 
that vast power, which we shall see no more in 
action, nor aught in any degree resembling it, among 
men. These first moments should be given to grief. 
It may employ, it may promote a calmer mood, to 
construct a more elaborate and less unworthy me- 
morial. 

For the purposes of this moment and place, indeed, 
no more is needed. What is there for this Court or 
for this Bar to learn from me, here and now, of him ? 
The year and the day of his birth ; that birthplace 
on the frontier, yet bleak and waste ; the well, of 
which his childhood drank, dug by that father of whom 
he has said, " that through the fire and blood of seven 
years of revolutionary war he shrank from no danger, 
no toil, no sacrifice, to serve his country, and to raise 
his children to a condition better than his own ; " the 
elm-tree that father planted, fallen now, as father 
and son have fallen ; that training of the giant in- 
fancy on catechism and Bible, and Watts's version of 
the Psalms, and the traditions of Plymouth, and Fort 
William Henry, and the Revolution, and the age of 



224 REMARKS ON THE 

Wasliington and Franklin, on the banks of tlie Mer- 
rimack, flowing sometimes in flood and anger, from 
his secret springs in the crystal hills ; the two dis- 
trict schoolmasters, Chase and Tappan ; the village 
library ; the dawning of the love and ambition of 
letters ; the few months at Exeter and Boscawen ; 
the life of college ; the probationary season of school- 
teaching ; the clerkship in the Fryeburg Registry of 
Deeds; his admission to the bar, presided over by 
judges like Smith, illustrated by practisers such as 
Mason, where, by the studies, in the contentions of 
nine years, he laid the foundation of the professional 
mind ; his irresistible attraction to public life ; the 
oration on commerce ; the Rockingham resolutions ; 
his first term of four years' service in Congress, when, 
by one bound, he sprang to his place by the side of 
the foremost of the rising American statesmen ; his 
removal to this State ; and then the double and par- 
allel current in which his life, studies, thoughts, 
cares, have since flowed, bearing him to the leader- 
ship of the Bar by universal acclaim, bearing him to 
the leadership of public life, — last of that surpassing 
triumvirate, shall we say the greatest, the most 
widely known and admired? — all these things, to 
their minutest details, are known and rehearsed 
familiarly. Happier than the younger Pliny, happier 
than Cicero, he has found his historian, unsolicited, 
in his lifetime, and his countrymen have him all by 
heart ! 

There is, then, nothing to tell you, — nothing to 
bring to mind. And then, if I may borrow the lan- 
guage of one of his historians and friends, — one of 
those through whose beautiful pathos the common 



I 



DEATH OF MR. WEBSTER. 225 

sorrow uttered itself yesterday, in Faneuil Hall, — 
" I dare not come here and dismiss in a few summary 
paragraphs the character of one who has filled such a 
space in the history, one who holds such a place in 
the heart, of his country. It would be a disrespect- 
ful familiarity to a man of his lofty spirit, his great 
soul, his rich endowments, his long and honorable 
life, to endeavor thus to weigh and estimate them," 
— a half-hour of words, a handful of earth, for fifty 
years of great deeds, on high places ! 

But, although the time does not require any thing 
elaborated and adequate, — forbids it, rather, — some 
broken sentences of veneration and love may be in- 
dulged to the sorrow which oppresses us. 

There presents itself, on the first and to any ob- 
servation of Mr. Webster's life and character, a two- 
fold eminence, — eminence of the very highest rank, — 
in a twofold field of intellectual and public display, — 
the profession of the law and the profession of states- 
manship, — of which it would not be easy to recall 
any parallel in the biograph}' of illustrious men. 

Without seeking for parallels, and without asserting 
that they do iiot exist, consider that he was, by uni- 
versal designation, the leader of the general American 
Bar ; and that he was, also, by an equally universal 
designation, foremost of her statesmen living at his 
death ; inferior to not one who has lived and acted since 
the opening of his own public life. Look at these 
aspects of his greatness separately, and from opposite 
sides of the surpassing elevation. Consider that his 
single career at the bar may seem to have been enough 
to employ the largest faculties, without repose, for a 
lifetime ; and that, if then and thus the " infinitus 

15 



226 REMAEKS ON THE 

forensmm rerum labor " should have conducted him to 
a mere professional reward, — a bench of chancery or 
law, the crown of the first of advocates, jurisperitorum 
eloquentissimus, — to the pure and mere honors of a 
great magistrate, — that that would be as much as 
is allotted to the ablest in the distribution of fame. 
Even that half, if I may say so, of his illustrious 
reputation, — how long the labor to win it, how 
worthy of all that labor ! He was bred first in the 
severest school of the common law, in which its doc- 
trines were expounded by Smith, and its administra- 
tion shaped and directed by Mason, and its foundation 
principles, its historical sources and illustrations, its 
connection with the parallel series of statutory enact- 
ments, its modes of reasoning, and the evidence of 
its truths, he grasped easily and completely ; and I 
have myself heard him say, that for many years while 
still at the bar, he tried more causes, and argued more 
questions of fact to the jury than perliaps any other 
member of the profession anywhere. I have heard 
from others how, even then, he exemplified the same 
direct, clear, and forcible exhibition of proofs, and 
the reasonings appropriate to proofs, as well as the 
same marvellous power of discerning instantly what 
we call the decisive points of the cause in law and 
fact, by wliich he was later more wirlel}^ celebrated. 
This was the first epoch in his professional training. 

With the commencement of his public life, or with 
his later removal to this State, began the second 
epoch of his professional training, conducting him 
throuo-h the Gfradation of the national tribunals to the 
study and practice of the more flexible, elegant, and 
scientific jurisprudence of commerce and of chancery, 



1 

I 



DEATH OF MK. WEBSTET^. 227 

and to the grander and less fettered investigations of 
international, prize, and constitutional law, and giving 
him to breathe the air of a more famous forum, in a 
more public presence, with more variety of competi- 
tion, although he never met abler men, as I have 
heard him say, than some of those who initiated him 
in the rugged discipline of the Courts of New Hamp- 
shire ; and thus, at length, by these studies, these 
labors, this contention, continued without repose, he 
came, now many years ago, to stand omnium assensu 
at the summit of the American Bar. 

It is common and it is easy, in the case of all in 
such position, to point out other lawyers, here and 
there, as possessing some special qualification or at- 
tainment more remarkably, perhaps, because more 
exclusively, — to say of one that he has more cases 
in his recollection at any given moment, or that he 
was earlier grounded in equity, or has gathered more 
black letter or civil law, or knowledge of Sj^anish 
or of Western titles, — and these comparisons were 
sometimes made with him. But when you sought a 
counsel of the first rate for the great cause, who 
would most surely discern and most powerfully ex- 
pound the exact law, required by the controversy, in 
season for use ; who could most skilfully encounter 
the opposing law ; under whose powers of analysis, 
persuasion, and displa}', the asserted right would as- 
sume the most probable aspect before the intelligence 
of the judge ; who, if the inquiry became blended 
with or resolved into facts, could most completely 
develop and most irresistibly expose them ; one " the 
law's whole thunder born to wield," — Avhen you 
sought such a counsel, and could have the choice, I 



228 REMARKS ON THE 

think the universal profession would have turned to 
him. And this would be so in nearly every descrip- 
tion of cause, in any department. Some able men 
wield civil inquiries with a peculiar ability; some 
criminal. How lucidly and how deeply he elucidated 
a question of property, you all know. But then, 
with what address, feeling, pathos, and prudence he 
defended, with what dignity and crushing power, 
accusatorio spiritu^ he prosecuted the accused of 
crime, whom he believed to have been guilty, few 
have seen ; but none who have seen can ever for- 
get it. 

Some scenes there are, some Alpine eminences 
rising above the high table-land of such a professional 
life, to which, in the briefest tribute, we should love 
to follow him. We recall that day, for an instance, 
when he first announced, with decisive display, what 
manner of man he was, to the Supreme Court of the 
nation. It was in 1818, and it was in the argument 
of the case of Dartmouth College. William Pinkney 
was recruiting his great faculties, and replenishing 
that reservoir of professional and elegant acquisition, 
in Europe. Samuel Dexter, " the honorable man, and 
the counsellor, and the eloquent orator," was in his 
grave. The boundless old-school learning of Luther 
Martin ; the silver voice and infinite analytical inge- 
nuity and resources of Jones ; the fervid genius of 
Emmett pouring itself along immenso ore; the ripe 
and beautiful cultnre of Wirt and Hopkinson, — the 
steel point, unseen, not unfelt, beneath the foliage ; 
Harper himself, statesman as well as lawyer, — these, 
and such as these, were left of that noble bar. That 
day Mr. Webster opened the cause of Dartmouth 



DEATH OF MR. WEBSTER. 229 

College to a tribunal unsurpassed on earth in all that 
gives illustration to a bench of law, not one of whom 
any longer survives. 

One would love to linger on the scene, when, after 
a masterly argument of the law, carrying, as we may 
now know, conviction to the general mind of the 
court, and vindicating and settling for his lifetime 
his place in that forum, he paused to enter, with an 
altered feeling, tone, and manner, with these "words, 
on his peroration : " I have brought my Ahna Mater 
to this presence, that, if she must fall, she may fall 
in her robes and with dignity; " and then broke forth 
in that strain of sublime and pathetic eloquence, of 
which we know not much more than that, in its prog- 
ress, Marshall, — the intellectual, the self-controlled, 
the unemotional, — announced, visibly, the presence 
of the unaccustomed enchantment. 

Other forensic triumphs crowd on us, in other com- 
petition, with other issues. But I must commit them 
to the historian of constitutional jurisprudence. 

And now, if this transcendent professional repu- 
tation were all of Mr. Webster, it might be i3rac- 
ticable, tliough not easy, to find its parallel elsewhere, 
in our own, or in European or classical biography. 

But, when you consider that, side by side with this, 
there was growing up that other reputation, — that 
of the first American statesman ; that, for thirty-three 
years, and those embracing his most Herculean works 
at the bar, he was engaged as a member of either 
House, or in the highest of the executive depart- 
ments, in the conduct of the largest national affairs, 
in the treatment of the largest national questions, in 
debate with the highest abilities of American public 



230 REMARKS ON THE 

life, conducting diplomatic intercourse in delicate re- 
lations with all manner of foreign powers, investigat- 
ing whole classes of truths, totally unlike the truths 
of the law, and resting on principles totally distinct, 
— and that here, too, he was Avise, safe, controlling, 
trusted, tlie foremost man ; that Europe had come to 
see in his life a guaranty for justice, for peace, for the 
best hopes of civilization, and America to feel surer 
of her glory and her safety as his great arm enfolded 
her, — you see how rare, how solitary, almost, was 
the actual greatness ! Who, anj^where, has won, as 
he had, the double fame, and worn the double wreath 
of Murray and Chatham, of Dunning and Fox, of 
Erskine and Pitt, of William Pinkney and Pufus 
King, in one blended and transcendent superiority? 

I cannot attempt to grasp and sum up the aggre- 
gate of the service of his public life at such a moment 
as this ; and it is needless. That life comprised a 
term of more than thirty-three years. It produced a 
body of performance, of which I may sa}^, generally, 
it Avas all which the first abilities of the country and 
time, employed with unexampled toil, stimulated by 
the noblest patriotism, in the highest places of the 
State, in the fear of God, in the presence of nations, 
could possibly compass. 

He came into Congress after the war of 1812 had 
begun, and though probably deeming it unnecessary, 
according to the highest standards of public necessity, 
in his private character, and objecting, in his public 
character, to some of the details of the policy by which 
it was prosecuted, and standing by party ties in general 
opposition to the administration, he never breathed a 
sentiment calculated to depress the tone of the pub- 



DEATH OF MR. WEBSTER. 231 

lie mind, to aid or comfort the enemy, to check or 
chill the stirrings of that new, passionate, unquench- 
able spirit of nationality, which then was revealed, 
or kindled to burn till we go down to the tombs of 
States. 

With the peace of 1815 his more cherished public 
labors began ; and thenceforward he devoted him- 
self—the ardor of his civil youth, the energies of 
his maturest manhood, the autumnal wisdom of the 
ripened year — to the offices of legislation and diplo- 
macy ; of preserving the peace, keeping the honor, 
establishing the boundaries, and vindicating the neu- 
tral rights of his country ; restoring a sound currency, 
and laying its foundation sure and deep ; in uphold- 
ing public credit; in promoting foreign commerce 
and domestic industry ; in developing our uncounted 
material resources, — giving the lake and the river 
to trade, — and vindicating and interpreting the con- 
stitution and the law. On all these subjects, — on all 
measures practically in any degree affecting them, — 
he has inscribed his opinions and left the traces of 
his hand. EveryAvhere the philosophical and patriot 
statesman and thinker will find that he has been be- 
fore him, lighting the way, sounding the abyss. His 
weighty language, his sagacious warnings, his great 
maxims of empire, will be raised to view, and live to 
be deciphered when the final catastrophe shall lift the 
granite foundation in fragments from its bed. 

In this connection I cannot but remark to how 
extraordinary an extent had Mr. Webster, by his acts, 
words, thoughts, or the events of his life, associated 
himself for ever in the memory of all of us with every 
historical incident, or, at least, with every historical 



232 REMARKS ON THE 

epoch, with every policy, with every glory, with every 
great name and fundamental institution, and grand 
or beautiful image, which are peculiarly and properly 
. American. Look backwards to the planting of Ply- 
mouth and Jamestown ; to the various scenes of colo- 
nial life in peace and war ; to the opening and march 
and close of the revolutionary drama ; to the age of 
the constitution ; to Washington and Franklin and 
Adams and Jefferson ; to the whole train of causes, 
from the Reformation downwards, which prepared us 
to be republicans ; to that other train of causes Avhich 
led us to be unionists, — look round on field, work- 
shop, and deck, and hear the music of labor rewarded, 
fed, and protected ; look on the bright sisterhood of 
the States, each singing as a seraph in her motion, 
yet blending in a common harmony, — and there is 
nothing which does not bring him by some tie to the 
memorv of America. We seem to see his form and 
hear his deep, grave speech everywhere. By some 
felicity of his personal life ; by some wise, deep, or 
beautiful word, spoken or written ; by some service 
of his own, or some commemoration of the services of 
others, it has come to pass that " our granite hills, 
our inland seas, and prairies, and fresh, unbounded, 
magnificent wilderness," our encircling ocean, the 
Kock of the Pilgrims, our new-born sister of the Pa- 
cific, our popular assemblies, our free schools, all our 
cherished doctrines of education, and of the influence 
of religion, and material policy, and the law, and the 
constitution, give us back his name. What American 
landscape will you look on, what subject of American 
interest will you study, what source of hope or of 
anxiety, as an American, will you acknowledge, that 
does not recall him ! 



DEATH OF MR. WEBSTER. 233 

I shall not venture, in this rapid and general recol- 
lection of Mr. Webster, to attempt to analyze that 
intellectual power which all admit to have been so 
extraordinar}^, or to com^^are or contrast it with the 
mental greatness of others, in variety or degree, of 
the living or the dead ; or even to attempt to appre- 
ciate, exactly, and in reference to canons of art, his 
single attribute of eloquence. Consider, however, 
the remarkable phenomenon of excellence in three 
unkindred, one might have thought, incompatible 
forms of public speech, — that of the forum, with its 
doable audience of bench and jury, of the halls of 
legislation, and of the most thronged and tumultuous 
assemblies of the people. 

Consider, further, that this multiform eloquence, 
exactly as his words fell, became at once so much 
accession to permanent literature, in the strictest 
sense, solid, attractive, and rich, and ask how often 
in the history of public life such a thing has been 
exemplified. Recall what pervaded all these forms 
of display, and every effort in every form, — that 
union of naked intellect, in its largest measure, which 
penetrates to the exact truth of the matter in hand, 
by intuition or by inference, and discerns every thing 
which may make it intelligible, probable, or credible 
to another, with an emotional and moral nature pro- 
found, passionate, and ready to kindle, and with an 
imagination enough to supply a hundred-fold more of 
illustration and asjGrrandizement than his taste suffered 
him to accept ; tliat union of greatness of soul with 
depth of heart, which made his speaking almost more 
an exhibition of character than of mere genius ; the 
style, not merely pure, clear Saxon, but so constructed. 



234 REMARKS ON THE 

SO numerous as far as becomes prose, so forcible, so 
abounding in unlabored felicities ; the words so choice ; 
the epithet so pictured ; the matter absolute truth, or 
the most exact and specious resemblance the human 
wit can devise ; the treatment of the subject, if you 
have recfard to the kind of truth he had to handle, — 
political, ethical, legal, — as deep, as complete as 
Paley's, or Locke's, or Butler's, or Alexander Ham- 
ilton's, of their subjects ; yet that depth and that 
completeness of sense, made transparent as through 
crystal waters, all embodied in harmonioas or well- 
composed periods, raised on winged language, vivified, 
fused, and poured along in a tide of emotion, fervid, 
and incapable to be withstood; recall the form, the 
eye, the brow, the tone of voice, the presence of the 
intellectual king of men, — recall him thus, and, in 
the language of Mr. Justice Story, commemorating 
Samuel Dexter, we may well '' rejoice that we have 
lived in the same age, that we have listened to his 
eloquence, and been instructed by his wisdom." 

I cannot leave the subject of his eloquence without 
returning to a thought I have advanced already. All 
that he has left, or the larger portion of all, is the 
record of spoken words. His works, as already col- 
lected, extend to many volumes, — a library of reason 
and eloquence, as Gibbon has said of Cicero's, — but 
the}' are volumes of speeches only, or mainly ; and 
yet who does not rank him as a great American au- 
thor ? an author as truly expounding, and as charac- 
teristically exemplifying, in a pure, genuine, and 
harmonious English style, the mind, thought, point of 
view of objects, and essential nationality of his coun- 
try as any other of our authors, professedly so de- 



DEATH OF MR. WEBSTER. 235 

nominated? Against the maxim of Mr. Fox, his 
speeches read well, and yet were good speeches — 
great speeches — in the delivery. For so grave were 
they, so thoughtful and true, so much the eloquence 
of reason at last, so strikingly always they contrived 
to link the immediate topic with other and broader 
principles, ascending easily to widest generalizations, 
so happy was the reconciliation of the qualities which 
engage the attention of hearers, yet reward the pe- 
rusal of students, so critically did they keep the right 
side of the line which parts eloquence from rhetoric, 
and so far do they rise above the penury of mere de- 
bate, that the general reason of the country has en- 
shrined them at once, and for ever, among our classics. 
It is a common belief that Mr. Webster was a 
various reader; and I think it is true, even to a 
greater degree than has been believed. In his pro- 
fession of politics, nothing, I think, worthy of atten- 
tion had escaped him ; nothing of the ancient or 
modern prudence ; nothing which Greek or Roman 
or European speculation in that walk had explored, 
or Greek or Roman or European or universal history 
or public biography exemplified. I shall not soon 
forget with what admiration he spake, at an inter- 
view to Avhich he admitted me, while in the Law 
School at Cambridge, of the politics and ethics of 
Aristotle, and of the mighty mind which, as he said, 
seemed to have " thought through " so many of the 
great problems Avhich form the discipline of social 
man. American history and American political liter- 
ature he had by heart, — the long series of influences 
which trained us for representative and free govern- 
ment ; that other series of influences which moulded 



236 REMARKS ON THE 

US into a united government ; the colonial era ; the 
age of controversy before the revolution ; every scene 
and every person in that great tragic action ; every 
question which has successively engaged our politics, 
and every name which has figured in them, — the 
whole stream of our time was open, clear, and pres- 
ent ever to liis eye. 

Beyond his profession of politics, so to call it, he 
had been a diligent and choice reader, as his extraor- 
dinary style in part reveals ; and I think the love of 
reading would have gone with him to a later and 
riper age, if to such an age it had been the will of 
God to preserve him. This is no place or time to 
appreciate this branch of his acquisitions ; but there 
is an interest inexpressible in knowing who were any 
of the chosen from among the great dead in the li- 
brary of such a man. Others may correct me, but I 
should say of that interior and narrower circle were 
Cicero, Virgil, Shakspeare, — whom he knew famil- 
iarly as the constitution, — Bacon, IMilton, Burke, 
Johnson, — to whom I hope it is not pedantic nor 
fanciful to say, I often thought his nature presented 
some resemblance ; the same abundance of the gen- 
eral propositions required for explaining a difficulty 
and refuting a sophism copiously and promptly occur- 
rimr to him ; the same kindness of heart and wealth 
of sensibility, under a manner, of course, more cour- 
teous and gracious, yet more sovereign ; the same suffi- 
cient, yet not predominant, imagination, stooping ever 
to truth, and giving affluence, vivacity, and attraction 
to a powerful, correct, and weighty style of prose. 

I cannot leave this life and character without se- 
lecting and dwelling a moment on one or two of his 



DEATH OF MR. WEBSTER. 237 

traits, or virtues, or felicities, a little longer. There 
is a collective impression made by the whole of an 
eminent pe'rson's life, beyond and other than, and 
apart from, that which thfe mere general biographer 
would afford the means of explaining. There is an 
influence of a great man derived from things inde- 
scribable, almost, or incapable of enumeration, or 
singly insufficient to account for it, but through which 
his spirit' transpires, and his individuality goes forth 
on the contemporary generation. And thus, I should 
say, one grand tendenoy' of his life and character was 
to elevate the whole tone of the public mind. He 
did this, indeed, not merely by example. He did it 
by dealing, as he thought, truly and in manly fashion 
with that public mind. He evinced his love of the 
people, not so much by honeyed phrases as by good 
counsels and useful service, vera pro gratis. He 
showed how he appreciated them by submitting sound 
arguments to their understandings, and right motives 
to their free will. He came before them, less with 
flattery than with instruction ; less with a vocabulary 
larded with the words humanity and philanthropy, 
and progress and brotherhood, than with a scheme of 
politics, an educational, social, and governmental 
system, which would have made them prosperous, 
happy, and great. 

What the greatest of the Greek historians said of 
Pericles, we all feel might be said of him : " He did 
not so much follow as lead the people, because he 
framed not his words to please them, lilce one who is 
gaining power by unworthy means, but was able and 
dared, on the strength of his high character, even to 
brave their anger by contradicting their will." 



238 REMARKS ON THE 

I should indicate it as another influence of his life, 
acts, and opinions, that it was, in an extraordinary 
degree, uniformly and liberally conservative. He 
saw with Adsion as of a j)rophet, that if our system of 
united government can be maintained till a nation- 
ality shall be generated, of due intensity and due 
compreliension, a glory indeed millennial, a progress 
without end, a triamj)h of humanity hitherto unseen, 
were ours ; and, therefore, he addressed himself to 
maintain that united government. 

Standing on the Rock of Plymouth, he bade dis- 
tant generations hail, and saw them rising, " demand- 
ing life, impatient for the skies," from what then 
were '' fresh, unbounded, magnificent wildernesses ; " 
from the shore of the great, tranquil sea, not yet be- 
come ours. But observe to what he welcomes them ; 
by what he would bless them. " It is to good gov- 
ernment." It is to " treasures of science and delights 
of learning." It is to the '' sweets of domestic life, 
the immeasurable good of rational existence, the im- 
mortal hopes of Christianit}^ the light of everlasting 
truth." 

It will be happy, if the wisdom and temper of his 
administration of our foreign affairs shall preside in 
the time which is at hand. Sobered, instructed by 
the examples and warnings of all the past, he yet 
gathered from the study and comparison of all the 
eras that there is a silent progress of the race, — 
without pause, without haste, without return, — to 
which the counsellings of history are to be accommo- 
dated by a wise philosophy. More than, or as much 
as that of any of our public characters, his states- 
manship was one which recognized a Europe, an old 



DEATH OF MR. WEBSTER. 239 

world, but yet grasped the capital idea of the Amer- 
ican position, and deduced from .it the whole fashion 
and color of its policy ; which discerned that we are 
to play a high part in human affairs, but discerned, 
also, what part it is, — peculiar, distant, distinct, and 
grand as our hemisphere ; an influence, not a con- 
tact, — the stage, the drama, the catastrophe, all but 
the audience, all our own, — and if ever he felt him- 
self at a loss, he consulted, reverently, the genius of 
Washington. 

In brinmnof these memories to a conclusion, — for 
I omit many things because I dare not trust myself 
to speak of them, — I shall not be misunderstood, or 
give offence, if I hope that one other trait in his pub- 
lic character, one doctrine, rather, of his political 
creed, may be remembered and be appreciated. It 
is one of the two fundamental precepts in which 
Plato, as expounded by the great master of Latin 
eloquence and reason and morals, comprehends the 
duty of those who share in the conduct of the state, — 
" ut qucecuyique agiint, totum corpus reipubliecB curent^ 
nedum partem aliquam tuentur^ reliquas deseraiit;'' 
that they comprise in their care the whole body of 
the Republic, nor keep one part and desert another. 
He gives the reason, — one reason, — of the precept, 
" qui autem parti civium considunt^ partem negligunt^ 
rem perniciosissimam in civitatem inducimt, seditionem 
atque discordiam.'' The patriotism which embraces 
less than the whole induces sedition and discord, the 
last evil of the State. 

How profoundly he had comprehended this truth ; 
with what persistency, with Avhat passion, from the 
first hour he became a public man to the last beat of 
the great heart, he cherished it; hoAV little he ac- 



240 DEATH OF MR. WEBSTER. 

counted the good, the praise, the blame cf this local- 
ity or that, in comparison of the larger good and the 
general and thoughtful approval of his own, and our, 
whole America, — she this day feels and announces. 
Wheresoever a drop of her blood flows in the veins 
of men, this trait is felt and appreciated. The hunter 
beyond Superior; the fisherman on the deck of the 
nigh night-foundered skiff; the sailor on the utter- 
most sea, — will feel, as he hears these tidings, that 
the protection of a sleepless, all-embracing, parental 
care is withdrawn from hin> for a space, and that his 
pathway henceforward is more solitary and less safe 
than before. 

But I cannot pursue these thoughts. Among the 
eulogists who have just uttered the eloquent sorrow 
of England at the death of the great Duke, one has 
employed an image and an idea which I venture to 
jffjj/kiiy and appropriate. 

" The Northmen's image of death is finer than that 
of other climes ; no skeleton, but a gigantic figure 
that envelops men within the massive folds of its 
dark garment." Webster seems so enshrouded from 
us, as the last of the mighty three, themselves follow- 
ing a mighty series, — the greatest closing the pro- 
cession. The robe draws round him, and the era is 
past. 

Yet how much there is which that all-ample fold 
shall not hide, — the recorded wisdom, the great ex- 
ample, the assured immortality. 

They speak of monuments ! 

" Nothing can cover liis high fame but heaven ; 
No pyramids set off his memories 
But the eternal substance of his greatness ; 
To ^Yhich I leave him." 



EULOGY ON DANIEL WEBSTER. 241 



A DISCOURSE COMMEMORATIVE OF 
DANIEL WEBSTER. 

DELIVERED BEFORE THE FACULTY, STUDENTS, AND ALUMNI 
OF DARTMOUTH COLLEGE, JULY 27, 1853. 



It would be a strange neglect of a beautiful and ap- 
proved custom of the schools of learning, and of one 
of the most pious and appropriate of the offices of 
literature, if the college in which the intellectual life 
of Daniel Webster began, and to which his name im- 
parts charm and illustration, should give no formal 
expression to her grief in the common sorrow ; if she 
should not draw near, of the most sad, in the proces- 
sion of the bereaved, to the tomb at the sea, nor find, 
in all her classic shades, one affectionate and grateful 
leaf to set in the garland with which they have bound 
the brow of her child, the mightiest departed. Others 
mourn and praise him by his more distant and more 
general titles to fame and remembrance ; his su- 
premacy of intellect, his statesmanship of so many 
years, his eloquence of reason and of the heart, his 
love of country, incorruptible, conscientious, and rul- 
ing every hour and act ; that greatness combined of 
genius, of character, of manner, of place, of achieve- 
ment, which was just now among us, and is not, and 
yet lives still and evermore. You come, his cherish- 
ing mother, to own a closer tie, to indulge an emotion 

16 



242 EULOGY ON DANIEL WEBSTER. 

more personal and more fond, — grief and exultation 
contending for mastery, as in the bosom of the deso- 
lated parent, whose tears could not hinder him from 
exclaiming, " I would not exchange my dead son for 
any living one of Christendom." 

Many places in our American world have spoken 
his eulogy. To all places the service was befitting, 
for " his renown, is it not of the treasures of the 
whole country?" To some it belonged, with a strong 
local propriety, to discharge it. In the Inxlls of Con- 
gress, where the majestic form seems ever to stand, 
and the deep tones to linger, the decorated scene of 
his larger labors and most diffusive glory ; in the 
courts of law, to whose gladsome light he loved to 
return, — putting on again the robes of that profes- 
sion ancient as magistracy, noble as virtue, necessary 
as justice, — in which he found the beginning of his 
honors ; in Faneuil Hall, whose air breathes and burns 
of him ; in the commercial cities, to whose pursuits 
his diplomacy secured a peaceful sea ; in the cities of 
the inland, around which his capacious public affec- 
tions, and wise discernment, aimed ever to develop 
the uncounted resources of that other, and that 
larger, and that newer America ; in the pulpit, whose 
place among the higher influences which exalt a State, 
our guide in life, our consolation in death, he appre- 
ciated j^rofoundly, and vindicated by weightiest aigu- 
ment and testimony, of whose offices it is among the 
fittest to mark and point the moral of the great things 
of the world, tlie excellency of dignity, and the ex- 
cellency of power passing away as the pride of the 
wave, — passing from our eye to take on immortality, 
— in these places, and such as these, there seemed a 



I 



EULOGY ON DANIEL WEBSTER. 243 

reason beyond, and other, than the universal calamity, 
for such honors of the grave. But if so, how fit a 
place is this for such a service ! We are among the 
scenes where the youth of Webster awoke first and 
fully to the life of the mind. We stand, as it were, 
at the sources — physical, social, moral, intellectual — 
of that exceeding greatness. Some now here saw that 
youth : almost it was yours, Nilum parvum vider'e. 
Some, one of his instructors certainly, some possibly 
of his classmates, or nearest college friends, some of 
the books he read, some of the apartments in which 
he studied, are here. We can almost call up from 
their habitation in the past, or in the fanc}^, the whole 
spiritual circle which environed that time of his life; 
the opinions he had embraced ; the theories of mind, 
of religion, of morals, of philosophy, to which he had 
surrendered himself; the canons of taste and criti- 
cism which he had accepted ; the great authors whom 
he loved best ; the trophies which began to disturb 
his sleep ; the facts of history which he had learned, 
believed, and begun to interpret ; the shapes of hope 
and fear in which imagination began to bring before 
him the good and evil of the future. Still the same 
outward world is around you, and above you. The 
sweet and solemn flow of the river, gleaming through 
interval here and there ; margins and samples of the 
same old woods, but thinned and retiring ; the same 
range of green hills yonder, tolerant of culture to the 
top, but shaded then by primeval forests, on whose 
crest the last rays of sunset lingered ; the summit of 
Ascutney ; the great northern light that never sets ; 
the constellations that walk around, and watch the 
.pole ; the same nature, undecayed, unchanging, is 



244 EULOGY ON DANIEL WEBSTER. 



here. Almost, the idolatries of the old paganism 
grow intelligible. '•'• Magnorum fliiminum capita ven- 
eramur^"" exclaims Seneca. " Suhita et ex ahriipto 
vasti amnis eruptio aras Jiahet!''^ We stand at the 
fountain of a stream ; we stand, rather, at the place 
where a stream, sudden, and from hidden springs, 
bursts to light ; and whence we can follow it along 
and down, as we might our own Connecticut, and 
trace its resplendent pathway to the sea ; and we 
venerate, and would almost build altars here. If I 
may adopt the lofty language of one of the admirers 
of William Pitt, we come naturally to this place, as 
if we could thus recall every circumstance of splendid 
preparation which contributed to fit the great man 
for the scene of his glory. We come, as if better 
here than elsewhere " we could watch, fold by fold, 
the bracing on of his Vulcanian panopl}^ and observe 
with pleased anxiety the leading forth of that chariot 
which, borne on irresistible wheels, and drawn by 
steeds of immortal race, is to crush the necks of the 
mighty, and sweep away the serried strength of 



1 



armies." 



And, therefore, it were fitter that I should ask of 
you, than speak to you, concerning him. Little, in- 
deed, anywhere can be added now to that wealth of 
eulogy that has been heaped upon his tomb. Before 
he died, even, renowned in two hemispheres, in ours 
he seemed to be known with a universal nearness of 
knowledge. He walked so long and so conspicuously 
before the general eye ; his actions, his opinions, on 
all things which had been large enough to agitate the 
public mind for the last thirty years and more, had had 
importance and consequences so remarkable, — anx- 



EULOGY ON DANIEL WEBSTER. 245 

iouslj waited for, passionately canvassed, not adopted 
always into the particular measure, or deciding the 
particular vote of government or the country, yet 
sinking deep into the reason of the people, — a stream 
of influence whose fruits it is yet too soon for political 
philosoj^hy to appreciate completely ; an impression 
of his extraordinary intellectual endowments, and of 
their peculiar superiority in that most imposing and 
intelligible of all forms of manifestation, the moving 
of others' minds by speech, — this impression had 
grown so universal and fixed, and it had kindled curi- 
osity to hear him and read him so wide and so largely 
indulged; his individuality altogether was so abso- 
lute and so pronounced, the force of will no less than 
the power of genius ; the exact type and fashion of 
his mind, not less than its general magnitude, were 
so distinctly shown through his musical and trans- 
parent style ; the exterior of the man, the grand 
mystery of brow and eye, the deep tones, the solemn- 
ity, the sovereignty, as of those who would build 
States, where every power and every grace did seem 
to set its seal, had been made, by personal observa- 
tion, by description, by the exaggeration, even, of 
those who had felt the spell, by art, the daguerrotype 
and picture and statue, so familiar to the American 
eye, graven on the memory like the Washington of 
Stuart ; the narrative of the mere incidents of his 
life had been so often told, — by some so authentic- 
ally and with such skill, — and had been so literally 
committed to heart, that when he died there seemed 
to be little left but to say when and how his change 
came ; with what dignity, with what possession of 
, himself, with what lovino^ thouQ^ht for others, with 



246 EULOGY ON DANIEL WEBSTER. 

what gratitude to God, uttered with uufaltering 
voice, that it was appointed to him there to die ; to 
say how thus, leaning on the rod and staff of the 
promise, he took his way into the great darkness un- 
dismayed, till death should be swallowed up of life ; 
and tlien to relate how they laid him in that 
simple grave, and turning and pausing, and joining 
their voices to the voices of the sea, bade him hail 
and farewell. 

And yet I hardly know what there is in public 
biography, what there is in literature, to be com- 
pared, in its kind, with the variety and beauty and 
adequacy of the series of discourses through which 
the love and grief, and deliberate and reasoning ad- 
miration of America for this great man, have been 
uttered. Little, indeed, there would be for me to 
say, if I were capable of the light ambition of pro- 
posing to omit all which others have said on this 
theme before, — little to add, if I sought to say any 
thing wholly new. 

I have thought, — perhaps the place w^here I was 
to speak suggested the topic, — that before we ap- 
proach the ultimate and historical greatness of Mr. 
Webster in its two chief departments, and attempt to 
appreciate by what qualities of genius and character 
and what succession of action he attained it, there 
might be an interest in going back of all this, so to 
say, and pausing a few moments upon his youth. I 
include in that designation the period from his birth, 
on the eighteenth day of January, 1782, until 1805, 
when, twenty-three years of age, he declined the 
clerkship of his father's court, and dedicated himself 
irrevocably to the profession of the law and the 



EULOGY ON DANIEL WEBSTER. 247 

chances of a summons to less or more of public life. 
These twenty-three years we shall call the youth of 
Webster. Its incidents are few and well known, and 
need not long detain us. 

Until May, 1796, beyond the close of his fourteenth 
year, he lived at home, attending the schools of Mas- 
ters Chase and Tappan, successively ; at work some- 
times, and sometimes at play like any boy ; but finding 
ah-eady, as few beside him did, the stimulations and 
the food of intellectual life in the social library ; 
drinking in, unawares, from the moral and physical 
aspects about him, the lesson and the power of con- 
tention and self-trust ; and learning how much grander 
than the forest bending to the long storm ; or the 
silver and cherishing Merrimack swollen to inunda- 
tion, and turning, as love become madness, to ravage 
the subject interval ; or old woods sullenly retiring 
before axe and fire, — learning to feel how much 
grander than these was the coming in of civilization 
as there he saw it, courage, labor, patience, plain 
living, heroical acting, high thinking, beautiful feeling, 
the fear of God, love of country and neighborhood 
and family, and all that form of human life of which 
his father and mother and sisters and brother were 
the endeared exemplification. In the arms of that 
circle, on parent knees, or later, in intervals of work 
or play, the future American Statesman acquired the 
idea of country, and became conscious of a national 
tie and a national life. There and then, something, 
ghmpses, a little of the romance, the sweet and bitter 
memories of a soldier and borderer of the old colonial 
time and war, opened to the large dark eyes of the 
child; memories of French and Indians stealing up 



248 EULOGY ON DANIEL WEBSTER. 

to the very place where the story was telling ; of men 
shot down at the plough, within sight of the old log 
house ; of the massacre at Fort William Henry ; of 
Stark, of Howe, of Wolfe falling in the arms of vic- 
tory ; and then of the next age, its grander scenes 
and higher names, — of the father's part at Benning- 
ton and White Plains ; of Lafayette and Washington ; 
and then of the Constitution, just adoj)ted, and the 
first President, just inaugurated, with services of pub- 
lic thanksgiving to Almighty God, and the Union 
just sprung into life, all radiant as morning, harbinger 
and promise of a brighter day. You have heard how 
in that season he bought and first read the Constitu- 
tion on the cotton handkerchief. A small cannon, I 
think his biographers say, was the ominous plaything 
of Napoleon's childhood. But this incident reminds 
us rather of the youthful Luther, astonished and 
kindling over the first Latin Bible he ever saw, — or 
the still younger Pascal, permitted to look into the 
Euclid, to whose sublimities an irresistible nature had 
secretly attracted him. Long before his fourteenth 
year, the mother first, and then the father, and the 
teachers and the schools and the little neighborhood, 
had discovered an extraordinary hope in the boy; a 
purpose, a dream, not yet confessed, of giving him an 
education began to be cherished ; and in May, 1796, 
at the age of a little more than fourteen, he was sent 
to Exeter. I have myself heard a gentleman, long a 
leader of the Essex bar, and eminent in public life, 
now no more, who was then a pupil at the school, 
describe his large frame, superb face, immature man- 
ners, and rustic dress, surmounted with a student's 
gown, wlien first he came ; and say, too, how soon and 



EULOGY ON DANIEL WEBSTER. 249 

universally his capacity was owned. Who does not 
wish that the glorious Buckminster could have fore- 
seen and witnessed the whole greatness, but certainly 
the renown of eloquence, which was to come to the 
young stranger, whom, choking, speechless, the great 
fountain of feelings sealed as yet, he tried in vain to 
encourage to declaim before the unconscious, bright 
tribes of the school? The influences of Exeter on 
him were excellent, but his stay was brief. In the 
winter of 1796 he was at home again ; and in Feb- 
ruary, 1797, he was placed under the private tuition, 
and in the family, of Rev. Mr. Wood, of Boscawen. 
It was on the way with his father to the house of Mr. 
Wood that he first heard, with astonishment, that the 
parental love and good sense had resolved on the 
sacrifice of giving him an education at college. " I 
remember," he writes, " the very hill we were ascend- 
ing, through deep snows, in a New England sleigh, 
when my father made his purpose known to me. I 
could not speak. How could he, I thought, with so 
large a famil}^, and in such narrow circumstances, 
think of incurring so great an expense for me ? A 
warm glow ran all over me, and I laid my head on 
my father's shoulder and we23t." That speechlessness, 
that glow, those tears, reveal to us what his memory 
and consciousness could hardly do to him, that al- 
ready, somewhere, at some hour of day or evening or 
night, as he read some page, or heard some narrative, 
or saw some happier schoolfellow set off from Exeter 
to begin his college life, the love of intellectual en- 
joyment, the ambition of intellectual supremacy, had 
taken hold of him ; that, when or how he knew not, 
but before he was aware of it, the hope of obtaining 



250 EULOGY ON DANIEL WEBSTER. 

a liberal education and leading a professional life 
had come to be his last thought before he slept, his 
first when he awoke, and to shape his dreams. Be- 
hold in them, too, his Avhole future. That day, that 
hour, that very moment, from the deep snows of that 
slow hill he set out on the long ascent that bore him 
— " no step backward " — to the high places of the 
world ! He remained under the tuition of jNlr. Wood 
until August, 1796, and then entered this college, 
where he was, at the end of the full term of four 
years, graduated in 1801. Of that college life you 
can tell me more than I can tell you. It is the uni- 
versal evidence that it was distinguished by exem- 
plary demeanor, by reverence for religion, respect for 
instructors, and observance of law. We hear from 
all sources, too, that it was distinguished by assiduous 
and various studies. With the exception of one or 
two branches, for which his imperfect preparation 
had failed to excite a taste, he is reported to have 
addressed himself to the prescribed tasks, and to have 
availed himself of the whole body of means of liberal 
culture appointed by the government, with decorum 
and conscientiousness and zeal. We hear more than 
this. The whole course of traditions concerning his 
college life is full to prove two facts. The first is, 
that his reading — general and various far beyond the 
requirements of the Faculty, or the average capacity 
of that stage of the literary life — was not solid and 
useful merely, — which is vague commendation, — 
but it was such as predicted and educated the future 
statesman. In English literature, — its finer parts, 
its poetr}' and tasteful reading, I mean, — he had read 
much rather than many things ; but he had read 



EULOGY ON DANIEL WEBSTER. 251 

somewhat. That a young man of his emotional na- 
ture, — full of eloquent feeling, the germs of a fine 
taste, the ear for the music of words, the eye for all 
beauty and all sublimity, already in extraordinary 
measure his, — already practising the art of composi- 
tion, speech, and criticism, — should have recreated 
himself — as we know he did — with Shakspeare and 
Pope and Addison ; with the great romance of Defoe ; 
with the more recent biographies of Johnson, and his 
grand imitations of Juvenal ; with the sweet and re- 
fined simplicity and abstracted observation of Gold- 
smith, mingled with sketches of homefelt delight; 
with the " Elegy " of Gray, whose solemn touches 
soothed the thouo-hts or tested the consciousness of 
the last hour; with the vigorous originality of the 
then recent Cowper, whom he quoted when he came 
home, as it proved, to die, — this we should have ex- 
pected. But I have heard, and believe, that it was 
to another institution more austere and characteristic, 
that his own mind was irresistibly and instinctively 
even then attracted. The conduct of what Locke 
calls the human understanding ; the limits of human 
knowledge ; the means of coming to the knowledge 
of the different classes of truth ; the laws of thought ; 
the science of proofs which is logic ; the science of 
morals ; the facts of history ; the spirit of laws ; the 
conduct and aims of reasonings in politics, — these 
were the strong meat that announced and began to 
train the great political thinker and reasoner of a 
later day. 

I have heard that he might oftener be found in 
some solitary seat or walk, with a volume of Gordon's 
or Ramsay's Revolution, or of the ^'Federalist," or of 



252 EULOGY ON DANIEL WEBSTER. 

Hume's " History of England," or of his " Essays," 
or of Grotius, or Puffendorf, or Cicero, or Montes- 
quieu, or Locke, or Burke, than with Virgil, or 
Shakspeare, or the " Spectator." Of the history of 
opinions, in the department of philosophy, he was 
already a curious student. The oration he delivered 
before the United Fraternity, when he was graduated, 
treated that topic of opinion, under some aspects, — 
as I recollect from once reading the manuscript, — 
with copiousness, judgment, and enthusiasm ; and 
some of his ridicule of the Berkleian theory of the 
non-existence of matter, I well remember, anticipated 
the sarcasm of a later day on a currency all metal- 
lic, and on nullification as a strictly constitutional 
remedy. ^ 

The other fact, as well established by all we can 
gather of his life in college, is, that the faculty, so 
transcendent afterwards, of moving the minds of men 
by speech, was already developed and effective in a 
remarkable degree. Always there is a best writer or 
speaker or two in college ; but tliis stereotyped desig- 
nation seems wholly inadequate to convey the im- 
pression he made in his time. Many, now alive, have 
said that some of his performances, having regard to 
his youth, his objects, his topics, his audience, — one 
on the celebration of Independence, one a eulogy on 
a student much beloved, — produced an instant effect, 
and left a recollection to whicli nothing else could be 
compared ; which could be felt and admitted only, 
not explained ; but which now they know were the 
first sweet tones of inexplicable but delightful influ- 
ence of that voice, unconfirmed as yet, and unassured, 
whose more consummate expression charmed and sus- 



EULOGY ON DANIEL WEBSTER. 253 

pended the soul of a nation. To read these essays 
now, disappoints you somewhat. As Quintilian says 
of Hortensius, AjJjmret 2^lcicmsse aliquid eo dieente 
quod legentes non invenimus. Some spell there was 
in the spoken word which the reader misses. To find 
the secret of that spell, you must recall the youth of 
Webster. Beloved fondly, and appreciated by that 
circle as much as by any audience, larger, more ex- 
acting, more various, and more fit, Avhich afterwards 
he found anywhere ; known to be manly, just, pure, 
generous, affectionate ; known and felt by his strong 
will, his high aims, his commanding character, his 
uncommon and difficult studies ; he had every heart's 
warmest good wish with him when he rose ; and then, 
when, unchecked by any very severe theory of taste, 
unoppressed b}^ any dread of saying something in- 
compatible with his place and fame, or unequal to 
himself, he just unlocked the deep spring of that 
eloquent feeling, which, in connection with his power 
of mere intellect, was such a stupendous psychological 
mystery, and gave heart and soul, not to the conduct 
of an argument, or the investigation and display of 
a truth of the reason, but to a fervid, beautiful, and 
prolonged emotion, to grief, to eulogy, to the patriot- 
ism of scholars, — why need we doubt or wonder, as 
they looked on that presiding brow, the eye large, 
sad, unworldly, incapable to be fathomed, the lip and 
chin, whose firmness as of chiselled, perfect marble, 
profoundest sensibility alone caused ever to tremble, 
why wonder at the traditions of the charm which 
they owned, and the fame which they even then pre- 
dicted ? 

His collesre life closed in 1801. For the statement 



254 EULOGY ON DA]SnEL WEBSTER. 

that he had thought of selecting the profession of 
theology, the surviving members of his famil}^, his 
son and his brother-in-law, assure me that there is no 
foundation. Certainly, he began at once the study 
of the law, and, interrupted only by the necessitj^ of 
teaching an academy a few months, with which he 
united the recreation of recording deeds, he prose- 
cuted it at Salisbury in the office of Mr. Thompson, 
and at Boston in the office of ]\Ir. Gore, until March, 
1805, when, resisting the sharp temptation of a clerk- 
ship, and an annual salary of fifteen hundred dollars, 
he was admitted to the bar. 

And so he has put on the robe of manhood, and 
has come to do the work of life. Of his youth there 
is no need to say more. It had been pure, happy, 
strenuous ; in many things privileged. The influ- 
ence of home, of his father, and the excellent mother, 
and that noble brother, whom he loved so dearly, and 
mourned with such sorrow, — these influences on his 
heart, principles, will, aims, were elevated and strong. 
At an early age, comparatively, the then great dis- 
tinction of liberal education was his. His colleo'e 
life was brilliant and without a stain: and in movins: 
his admission to the bar, Mr. Gore presented him as 
one of extraordinary promise. 

" Witli prospects bright, upon the world he came, — 
Pure love of virtue, strong desire of fame ; 
Men watched the way his lofty mind would take, 
And all foretold the progress he would make." 

And yet, if on some day, as that season was drawing 
to its close, it had been foretold to him, that before 
his life, prolonged to little more than threescore years 
and ten, should end, he should see that country, in 



EULOGY ON DANIEL WEBSTER. 255 

whicli he was coming to act his part, expanded across 
a continent ; the thirteen States of 1801 multiplied 
to thirty-one ; the territory of the North-west and the 
great valle}^ below sown full of those stars of empire ; 
the Mississippi forded, and the Sabine and Rio Grande, 
and the Neuces ; the ponderous gates of the Rocky 
Mountains opened to shut no more ; the great tran- 
quil sea become our sea ; her area seven times larger, 
her people five times more in number ; that through 
all experiences of trial, the madness of party, the 
injustice of foreign powers, the vast enlargement of 
her borders, the antagonisms of interior interest and 
feeling, — the spirit of nationalit}^ would grow stronger 
still and more plastic ; that the tide of American 
feeling would run ever fuller ; that her agriculture 
would grow more scientific ; her arts more various 
and instructed, and better rewarded ; her commerce 
winged to a wider and still wider flight ; that the 
part she would play in human affairs would grow no- 
bler ever, and more recognized ; that in this vast 
growth of national greatness time would be found for 
the higher necessities of the soul ; that her popular 
and her higher education would go on advancing ; 
that her charities and all her enterprises of philan- 
thropy would go on enlarging ; that her age of lettered 
glory should find its auspicious dawn, — and then it 
had been also foretold him that even so, with her 
growth and strength, should his fame grow and be 
established and cherished, there where she should 
garner up her heart ; that by long gradations of ser- 
vice and labor he should rise to be, before he should 
taste of death, of the peerless among her great ones ; 
that he should win the double honor, and wear the 



<>56 EULOGY ON DANIEL WEBSTER. 

double wreath of professional and public supremacy ; 
that he should become her wisest to counsel and her 
most eloquent to persuade ; that he should come to 
be called the Defender of the Constitution and the 
preserver of honorable peace ; that the " austere glor}^ 
of sufferino' " to save the Union should be his ; that 
his death, at the summit of greatness, on the verge 
of a ripe and venerable age, should be distinguished, 
less by the flags at half-mast on ocean and lake, less 
by the minute-gun, less by the public procession and 
the appointed eulogy, than by sudden paleness over- 
spreading all faces, by gushing tears, by sorrow, 
thoughtful, boding, silent, the sense of desolateness, 
as if renown and grace were dead, — as if the hunt- 
er's path, and the sailor's, in the great solitude of 
wilderness or sea, henceforward were more lonely and 
less safe than before, — had this prediction been whis- 
pered, how calmly had that perfect sobriety of mind 
put it all aside as a pernicious or idle dream ! Yet, 
in the fulfilment of that prediction is told the remain- 
ing story of his life. 

It does not come within the plan which I have 
marked out for this discourse to repeat the incidents 
of that subsequent history. The more conspicuous 
are known to you and the whole American world. 
Minuter details the time does not permit, nor the oc- 
casion require. Some quite general views of what 
he became and achieved ; some attempt to appreciate 
that intellectual power, and force of will, and elabo- 
rate culture, and that power of eloquence, so splendid 
and remarkable, by which he wrought his work ; some 
tribute to the endearing and noble parts of his char- 
acter ; and some attempt to vindicate the political 



I 



EULOGY ON DANIEL WEBSTER. 257 

morality by which his public life was guided, even to 
its last great act, are all that I propose, and much 
more than I can hope worthily to accomplish. 

In coming, then, to consider what he became and 
achieved, I have always thought it was not easy to 
lay too much stress, in the first place, on that realiza- 
tion of what might have been regarded incompatible 
forms of superiority, and tliat exemplification of what 
might have been regarded incompatible gifts or 
acquirements — " rare in their separate excellence, 
wonderful in their special combination " — which 
meet us in him everywhere. Remark, first, that emi- 
nence — rare, if not unprecedented — of the first 
rate, in the two substantially distinct and unkindred 
professions, — that of the law, and that of public 
life. In surveying that ultimate and finished great- 
ness in which he stands before you in his full stature 
and at his best, this double and blended eminence is 
the first thing that fixes the eye, and the last. When 
he died he was first of American lawyers, and first of 
American statesmen. In both characters he contin- 
ued — discharging the foremost part in each — down 
to the falling of the awful curtain. Both characters 
he kept distinct, — the habits of mind, the forms of 
reasoning, the nature of the proofs, the style of elo- 
quence. Neither hurt nor changed the other. How 
much his understanding was " quickened and invigo- 
rated " by the law, I have often heard him acknowl- 
edge and explain. But how, in spite of the law, 
was that mind, by other felicity, and other culture, 
" opened and liberalized " also ! How few of what 
are called the bad intellectual habits of the bar he 
carried into the duties of statesmanship ! His inter- 

17 



258 EULOGY ON DANIEL WEBSTER. 

pretations of the constitution and of treaties ; his 
expositions of public law, — how little do you find in 
them, where, if anywhere, you would expect it, of 
the mere ingenuity, the moving of " vermiculate 
questions," the word-catching, the scholastic subtlety 
wdiich, in the phrase of his memorable quotation, 

"Can sever and divide 
A hair 'twixt north and north-west side," — 

ascribed by satire to the profession ; and how much 
of its truer function, and nobler power of calling, 
history, language, the moral sentiments, reason, com- 
mon sense, the high spirit of magnanimous nation- 
ality, to the search of truth ! How little do we find in 
his politics of another bad habit of the profession, the 
worst "idol of the cave," a morbid, unreasoning, and 
regretful passion for the past, that bends and weeps 
over the stream, running irreversibl}", because it will 
not return, and will not pause, and gives back to 
vanity every hour a changed and less beautiful face ! 
We ascribe to him certainly a sober and conservative 
habit of mind, and such he had. Such a habit the 
study and practice of the law doubtless does not im- 
pair. But his was my Lord Bacon's conservatism. 
He held with him, " that antiquity deserveth this 
reverence, that men should make a stand thereupon, 
and discover what is the best way ; but when the 
discovery is well taken, then to make progression." 
He would keep the Union according to the Constitu- 
tion, not as a relic, a memorial, a tradition, — not for 
what it has done, though that kindled his gratitude 
and excited his admiration, but for what it is now and 
hereafter to do, when adapted by a wise practical 
philosophy to a wider and higher area, to larger num- 



EULOGY ON DANIEL WEBSTER. 259 

bers, to severer and more glorious probation. Who 
better than he has grasped and disjjlayed the advanc- 
ing tendencies and enlarging duties of America? 
Who has caught — whose eloquence, whose genius, 
whose counsels, have caught more adequately the 
genuine inspiration of our destiny ? Who has better 
expounded by what moral and prudential policy, by 
what improved culture of heart and reason, by what 
true worship of God, by what good faith to all other 
nations, the dangers of that destiny may be disarmed, 
and its large promise laid hold on ? 

And while the lawyer did not hurt the statesman, 
the statesman did not hurt the lawyer. More ; the 
statesman did not modify, did not unrobe, did not 
tinge, the lawyer. It would not be to him that the 
epigram could have application, where the old Latin 
satirist makes the client complain that his lawsuit is 
concerning tres capellce^ — three kids ; and that his 
advocate, with large disdain of them, is haranguing 
with loud voice and both hands, about the slaughters 
of Cannse, the war of Mithridates, the perjuries of 
Hannibal. I could never detect that in his discus- 
sions of law he did not just as much recognize au- 
thority, just as anxiously seek for adjudications old 
and new in his favor, just as closely sift them and 
collate them, that he might bring them to his side if 
he could, or leave them ambiguous and harmless if he 
could not ; that he did not just as rigorously observe 
the peculiar mode which that science employs in 
passing from the known to the unknown, the peculiar 
logic of the law, as if he had never investigated any 
other than legal truth by any other organon than 
legal logic in his life. Peculiarities of legal reason- 



260 EULOGY ON DANIEL WEBSTER. 

ing he certainly had, belonging to the peculiar struct- 
ure and vast power of his mind ; more original 
thought, more discourse of principles, less of that 
mere subtlety of analysis which is not restrained by 
good sense, and tlie higher power of duly tempering 
and combining one truth in a practical science with 
other truths, from absurdity or mischief ; but still it 
was all strict and exact legal reasoning. The long 
habit of employing the more popular methods, the 
probable and plausible conjectures, the approxima- 
tions, the compromises of deliberative discussion, did 
not seem to have left the least trace on his vocabu- 
lary, or his reasonings, or his demeanor. No doubt, 
as a part of his whole culture, it helped to give en- 
largement and general power and elevation of mind ; 
but the sweet stream passed under the bitter sea, the 
bitter sea pressed on the sweet stream, and each flowed 
unmingled, unchanged in taste or color. 

I have said that this double eminence is rare, if not 
unprecedented. We do no justice to Mr. Webster, if 
we do not keep this ever in mind. How man}' exem- 
plifications of it do you find in British public life ? 
The Earl of Chatham, Burke, Fox, Sheridan, Wind- 
ham, Pitt, Grattan, Canning, Peel, — Avere they also, 
or any one, the acknowledged leader in Westminster 
Hall or on the circuit? And, on the other hand, 
would you say that the mere parliamentary career of 
Mansfield, or Thurlow, or Dunning, or Erskine, or 
Camden, or Curran, would compare in duration, con- 
stancy, variety of effort, the range of topics discussed, 
the fulness, extent, and affluence of the discussion, 
the influence exerted, the space filled, the senatorial 
character completely realized — with his? In our 



EULOGY ON DANIEL WEBSTER. 261 

own public life it is easier to find a parallel. Great 
names crowd on us in each department ; greater, or 
more loved, or more venerable, no annals can show. 
But how few even here have gathered the double 
wreath and the blended fame ! 

And now, having observed the fact of this combi- 
nation of quality and excellence scarcely comj)atible, 
inspect for a moment each by itself. 

The professional life of Mr. Webster began in the 
spring of 1805. It may not be said to have ended 
until he died ; but I do not know that it happened to 
him to appear in court, for the trial of a cause, after 
his argument of the Goodyear patent for improve- 
ments in the preparation of India-rubber, in Trenton. 
in March, 1852. 

There I saw, and last heard him. The thirty-four 
years which had elapsed since, a member of this Col- 
lege, at home for health, I first saw and heard him in 
the Supreme Court of Massachusetts, in the county 
of Essex, defending Jackman, accused of the robbery 
of Goodrich, had in almost all things changed him. 
The raven hair, the vigorous, full frame and firm 
tread, the eminent but severe beauty of the counte- 
nance, not yet sealed with the middle age of man, 
the exuberant demonstration of all sorts of power, 
which so marked him at first, — for these, as once 
they were, I explored in vain. Yet how far higher 
was the interest that attended him now : his sixty- 
nine years robed, as it were, with honor and with 
love, with associations of great service done to the 
state, and of great fame^ gathered and safe ; and then 
the perfect mastery of the cause in its legal and scien- 
tific principles, and in all its facts ; the admirable 



262 EULOGY ON DANIEL WEBSTER. 

clearness and order in which his propositions were 
advanced successively ; the power, the occasional 
high ethical tone, the appropriate eloquence, by 
which they were made probable and persuasive to the 
judicial reason, — these announced the leader of the 
American bar, with every faculty and every accom- 
plishment, by which he had won that proud title, 
wholly unimpaired ; the eye not dim nor the natural 
force abated. 

I cannot here and now trace, with any minuteness, 
the course of Mr. Webster at the bar during these 
forty-eight years from the opening of his office in 
Boscawen ; nor convey any impression whatever of 
the aggregate of labor which that course imposed ; or 
of the intellectual power which it exacted ; nor indi- 
cate the stages of his rise ; nor define the time when 
his position at the summit of the profession may be 
said to have become completely vindicated. You 
know, in general, that he began the practice of the 
law in New Hampshire in the spring of 1805 ; that 
he prosecuted it, here, in its severest school, with 
great diligence, and brilliant success, among com- 
petitors of larger experience and of consummate 
ability, until 1816 ; that he then removed to Massa- 
chusetts, and that there, in the courts of that State, 
and of other States, and in those of the general gov- 
ernment, and especially in the Supreme Court sitting 
at Washington, he pursued it as the calling by which 
he was to earn his daily bread, until he died. You 
know, indeed, that he did not pursue it exactly as 
one pursues it who confines himself to an office ; and 
seeks to do the current and miscellaneous business of 
a single bar. His professional employment, as I have 



EULOGY ON DANIEL WEBSTER. 263 

often heard him say, was very much the preparation 
of opinions on important questions, presented from 
every part of the country ; and the trial of causes. 
This kind of professional life allowed him seasonable 
vacations ; and it accommodated itself somcAvhat to 
the exactions of his other and public life. But it 
was all one long and continued practice of the law ; 
the professional character was never put off; nor the 
professional robe long unworn to the last. 

You know, too, his character as a jurist. This 
topic has been recently and separately treated, with 
great ability, by one in a high degree competent to 
the task, — the late learned Chief Justice of New 
Hampshire, now Professor of Law at Cambridge ; 
and it needs no additional illustration from me. Yet, 
let me say, that herein, also, the first thing which 
strikes you is the union of diverse, and, as I have 
'said, what might have been regarded incompatible 
excellences. 1 shall submit it- to the judgment of the 
universal American bar, if a carefully prepared opin- 
ion of Mr. \yebster, on any question of law whatever 
in the whole range of our jurisprudence, would not 
be accepted everywhere as of the most commanding 
authority, and as the highest evidence of legal truth? 
I submit it to that same judgment, if for many years 
before his death, they would not have rather chosen 
to intrust the maintenance and enforcement of any 
important proposition of law whatever, before any 
legal tribunal of character whatever, to his best exer- 
tion of his faculties, than to any other ability which 
the whole wealth of the profession could supply ? 

And this alone completes the description of a law- 
yer and a forensic orator of the first rate ; but it does 



264 EULOGY ON DANIEL WEBSTER. 

not complete the description of his professional char- 
acter. By the side of all this, so to speak, there was 
that whole class of qualities which made him for 
any description of trial by jury whatever, criminal or 
civil, by even a more universal assent, foremost. For 
that form of trial no faculty was unused or needless ; 
but you were most struck there to see the unrivalled 
legal reason put off, as it were, and reappear in the 
form of a robust common sense and eloquent feeling, 
applying itself to an exciting subject of business ; 
to see the knowledge of men and life by which the 
falsehood and veracity of witnesses, the probabilities 
and improbabilities of transactions as sworn to, were 
discerned in a moment ; the direct, plain, forcible 
speech ; the consummate narrative, a department 
which he had particularly cultivated, and in which 
no man ever excelled him ; the easy and perfect 
analysis by which he conveyed his side of the cause 
to the mind of the jury ; the occasional gush of 
strong feeling, indignation, or pity ; the masterly, 
yet natural way, in which all the moral emotions of 
which his cause was susceptible were called to use, 
the occasional sovereignty of dictation to which his 
convictions seemed spontaneously to rise. His efforts 
in trials by jury compose a more traditional and eva- 
nescent part of his professional reputation than his 
arguments on questions of law ; but I almost think 
they were his mightiest professional displays, or dis- 
plays of any kind, after all. 

One such I stood in a relation to witness with a 
comparatively easy curiosity, and yet with intimate 
and professional knowledge of all the embarrass- 
ments of the case. It was the trial of John Francis 



EULOGY ON DANIEL WEBSTER. 265 

Knapp, charged with being present, aiding, and abet- 
ting in the murder of Joseph White, in which Mr. 
Webster conducted the prosecution for the Common- 
wealth, — in the same year with his reply to Mr. 
Hayne, in the Senate and a few months later, — and 
when I bring to mind the incidents of that trial ; 
the necessity of proving that the prisoner was near 
enough to the chamber in which the murder was 
being committed by another hand to aid in the act, 
and was there with the intention to do so, and thus 
in point of law did aid in it — because mere accesso- 
rial guilt was not enough to convict him ; the diffi- 
culty of proving this — because the nearest point to 
which the evidence could trace him was still so dis- 
tant as to warrant a pretty formidable doubt whether 
mere curiosity had not carried him thither; and 
whether he could in any useful or even conceivable 
manner have cooperated with the actual murderer, if 
he had intended to do so ; and because the only mode 
of rendering it probable that he was there with a 
purpose of guilt was by showing that he was one of 
the parties to a conspiracy of murder, whose very 
existence, actors, and objects, had to be made out by 
the collation of the widest possible range of circum- 
stances — some of them pretty loose ; and even if he 
was a conspirator, it did not quite necessarily follow 
that any active participation was assigned to him for 
his part, any more than to his brother, who, con- 
fessedly took no such part — the great number of 
witnesses to be examined and cross-examined, a duty 
devolving wholly on him ; the quick and sound judg- 
ment demanded and supplied to determine what to 
use and wlmt to reject of a mass of rather un manage- 



266 EULOGY ON DANIEL WEBSTER. 

able materials ; the points in the law of evidence to 
be argued — in the course of which he made an ap- 
peal to the Bench on the complete impunity which 
the rejection of the prisoner's confession would give 
to the murder, in a style of dignity and energy, I 
should rather say of grandeur, which I never heard 
him equal before or after ; the high ability and 
fidelity with which every part of the defence was con- 
ducted ; and the great final summing up to which he 
brought, and in which he needed, the utmost exer- 
tion of ever}^ faculty he possessed to persuade the 
jury that the obligation of that duty the sense of 
which, he said, '' pursued us ever : it is omnipresent 
like the Deity : if we take the wings of the morning 
and dwell in the uttermost parts of the sea, duty 
performed or duty violated is still with us for our 
happiness or misery " — to persuade them that this 
obligation demanded that on his proofs they should 
convict the prisoner : to which he brought first the 
profound belief of his guilt, without which he could 
not have prosecuted him ; then skill consummate in 
inspiring them with a desire or a willingness to be 
instrumental in detecting that guilt ; and to lean on 
him in the effort to detect it ; then every resource of 
professional ability to break the force of the proposi- 
tions of the defence, and to establish the truth of his 
own : inferring a conspiracy to which the prisoner 
was a party, from circumstances acutely ridiculed by 
the able counsel opposing him as "Stuff" — but 
woven by him into strong and uniform tissue ; and 
then bridging over from the conspiracy to the not 
very necessary inference that the particular conspira- 
tor on trial was at his post, in execution of it, to aid 



EULOGY ON DANIEL WEBSTER. 267 

and abet — the picture of the murder with which he 
begun — not for rhetorical display, but to inspire 
solemnity and horror, and a desire to detect and 
punish for justice and for security ; the sublime ex- 
hortation to duty with which he closed — resting on 
the universality, and authoritativeness, and eternity 
of its obligation — which left in every juror's mind 
the impression that it was the duty of convicting in 
this particular case the sense of which would be with 
him in the hour of death, and in the judgment, and 
for ever — with these recollections of that trial I can- 
not help thinking it a more difficult and higher effort 
of mind than that more famous " Oration for the 
Crown." 

It would be not unpleasing nor inappropriate to 
pause, and recall the names of some of that succes- 
sion of competitors by whose rivalry the several 
stages of his professional life were honored and ex- 
ercised ; and of some of the eminent judicial persons 
who presided over that various and high contention. 
Time scarcely permits this ; but in the briefest notice 
I must take occasion to say that perhaps the most 
important influence — certainly the most important 
early influence — on his professional traits and for- 
tunes was that exerted by the great general abilities, 
impressive character, and legal genius of Mr. Mason. 
Who he was you all know. How much the juris- 
prudence of New Hampshire owes to him ; what 
deep traces he left on it; how much he did to 
promote the culture, and to preserve the integrity, 
of the old common law ; to adapt it to your wants, 
and your institutions ; and to construct a system 
of practice by which it was administered with ex- 



268 EULOGY ON DANIEL WEBSTER. 

traordinary energy and effectiveness for the discovery 
of truth, and the enforcement of right ; j^ou of the 
legal profession of this State will ever be proud 
to acknowledge. Another forum in a neighboring 
commonwealth witnessed and profited by the last la- 
bors and enlarged studies of the consummate lawyer 
and practiser ; and at an earlier day the Senate, the 
country, had recognized his vast practical wisdom 
and sagacity, the fruit of the highest intellectual 
endowments, matured thought, and profound observa- 
tion ; his fidelity to the obligations of that party con- 
nection to which he was attached ; his fidelity through 
all his life, still more conspicuous and still more ad- 
mirable, to the higher obligations of a considerate 
and enlarged patriotism. He had been more than 
fourteen years at the bar, when Mr. Webster came to 
it ; he discerned instantly what manner of man his 
youthful competitor was ; he admitted him to his 
intimate friendship ; and paid him the unequivocal 
compliment, and did him the real kindness, of com- 
pelling him to the utmost exertion of his diligence 
and capacity by calling out against him all his own. 
'' The proprieties of this occasion " — these are Mr. 
Webster's words in presenting the resolutions of the 
Suffolk Bar upon Mr. Mason's death — "compel me, 
with whatever reluctance, to refrain from the indul- 
gence of the personal feelings which arise in my heart 
upon the death of one with whom I have cultivated 
a sincere, affectionate, and unbroken friendship, from 
the day when I commenced my own professional ca- 
reer to the closing hour of his life. I will not say of 
the advantages Avhich I have derived from his inter- 
course and conversation all that Mr. Fox said of 



EULOGY ON DANIEL WEBSTER. 269 

Edmund Burke ; but I am bound to say, that of my 
own professional discipline and attainments, whatever 
they may be, I owe much to that close attention to 
the discharge of my duties which I was compelled to 
pay for nine successive years, from day to day, by 
Mr. Mason's efforts and arguments at the same bar. 
I must have been unintelligent indeed, not to have 
learned something from the constant displays of that 
power which I had so much occasion to see and feel."' 

I reckon next to his, for the earlier time of his life, 
the influence of the learned and accomplished Smith ; 
and next to these — some may believe greater — is 
that of Mr. Justice Story. That extraordinary per- 
son had been admitted to the bar in Essex in Massa- 
chusetts in 1801 ; and he was engaged in many trials 
in the county of Rockingham in this State before Mr. 
Webster had assumed his own established position. 
Their political opinions differed; but such was his 
afiluence of knowledge already ; such his stimulant 
enthusiasm ; he was burning with so incredible a pas- 
sion for learning and fame, that the influence on the 
still young Webster was instant ; and it was great 
and permanent. It was reciprocal too ; and an in- 
timacy began that attended the whole course of honor 
through which each, in his several sphere, ascended. 
Parsons he saw, also, but rarely ; and Dexter oftener, 
and with more nearness of observation, while yet lay- 
ing the foundation of his own mind and character ; 
and he shared largely in the universal admiration of 
that time, and of this, of their attainments and genius 
and diverse greatness. 

As he came to the grander practice of the national 
bar, other competition was to be encountered. Other 



270 EULOGY ON DANIEL WEBSTER. 

names begin to solicit us ; other contention ; higher 
prizes. It would be quite within the proprieties of 
this discourse to remember the parties, at least, to 
some of the higher causes, by which his ultimate 
professional fame was built up ; even if I could not 
liope to convey any impression of the novelty and 
difficidty of the questions which they involved, or of 
the positive addition which the argument, and judg- 
ment, made to the treasures of our constitutional and 
general jurisprudence. But there is only one of which 
I have time to say any thing, and that is the case 
which established the inviolability of the charter of 
Dartmouth College by the Legislature of the State 
of New Hampshire. Acts of the Legislature, passed 
in the 3'ear 1816, had invaded its charter. A suit 
was brought to test their validity. It was tried in 
the Supreme Court of the State ; a judgment was 
given against the College, and this was appealed to 
the Supreme Federal Court by writ of error. LTpon 
solemn argument the charter was decided to be a 
contract whose obligation a State may not impair ; 
the acts were decided to be invalid as an attempt to 
impair it, and you hold your charter under that decision 
to-day. How much Mr. Webster contributed to that 
result, how much the effort advanced his own distinc- 
tion at the bar, you all know. Well, as if of yes- 
terday, I remember hoAv it was written home from 
Washington, that '' Mr. Webster closed a legal argu- 
ment of great power by a peroration which charmed 
and melted his audience." Often since, I have heard 
vague accounts, not much more satisfactory, of the 
speech and the scene. I was aware that the report 
of his argument, as it was published, did not contain 



EULOGY ON DANIEL WEBSTER. 271 

the actual peroration, and I supposed it lost for ever. 
By the great kindness of a learned and excellent per- 
son, Dr. Chauncy A. Goodrich, a professor in Yale 
College, with whom I had not the honor of acquaint- 
ance, although his virtues, accomplishments, and most 
useful life were well known to me, I can read to you 
the words whose power, when those lips spoke them, 
so many owned, although they could not repeat them. 
As those lips spoke them, we shall hear them never- 
more, but no utterance can extinguish their simple, 
sweet, and perfect beauty. Let me first bring the 
general scene before you, and then you will hear the 
rest in Mr. Goodrich's description. It was in 1818, 
in the thirty-seventh year of Mr. Webster's age. It 
was addressed to a tribunal presided over by Mar- 
shall, assisted by Washington, Livingston, Johnson, 
Stor3% Todd, and Duvall, — a tribunal unsurpassed 
on earth in all that gives illustration to a bench of 
law, and sustained and venerated by a noble bar. He 
had called to his aid the ripe and beautiful culture of 
Hopkinson ; and of his opponents was William Wirt, 
then and ever of the leaders of the bar, who, with 
faculties and accomplishments fitting him to adorn 
and guide public life, abounding in deep professional 
learning, and in the most various and elegant acquisi- 
tions, — a ripe and splendid orator, made so by genius 
and the most assiduous culture, — consecrated all to 
the service of the law. It was before that tribunal, 
and in presence of an audience select and critical, 
among whom, it is to be borne in mind, were some 
graduates of the college, who were attending to assist 
against her, that he opened the cause. I gladly pro- 
ceed in the words of Mr. Goodrich. 



I 



272 EULOGY ON DANIEL WEBSTER. * 

I 

" Before going to Washington, which I did chiefly 
for the sake of hearing Mr. Webster, I was told that, 
in arguing the case at Exeter, New Hampshire, he 
had left the whole court-room in tears at the conclu- 
sion of his speech. This, I confess, struck me un- 
pleasantly, — any attempt at pathos on a purely legal 
question like this seemed hardly in good taste. On 
my way to Washington I made the acquaintance of 
Mr. AVebster. We were together for several days in 
Philadelphia, at the house of a common friend ; and 
as the College question was one of deep interest to 
literary men, we conversed often and largely on the 
subject. As he dwelt upon the leading points of the 
case, in terms so calm, simple, and precise, I said to 
myself more than once, in reference to the story I 
had heard, ' Whatever may have seemed appropriate 
in defending the College at home^ and on her own 
ground, there will be no appeal to the feelings of 
Judge Marshall and his associates at Washington.' 
The Supreme Court of the United States held its 
session, that winter, in a mean apartment of moderate 
size, — the Capitol not having been built after its 
destruction in 1814. The audience, when the case 
came on, was therefore small, consisting chiefly of 
legal men, the elite of the profession througliout the 
country. Mr. Webster entered upon his argument in 
the calm tone of easy and dignified conversation. His 
matter was so completely at his command that he 
scarcely looked at his brief, but went on for more 
than four hours with a statement so luminous, and 
a chain of reasoning so easy to be understood, and 
yet approaching so nearly to absolute demonstration, 
that he seemed to carry with him every man of his 



EULOGY ON DANIEL WEBSTER. 273 

audience without the slightest effort or weariness on 
either side. It was hardly eloquence^ in the strict 
sense of the term ; it was pure reason. Now and 
\ then, for a sentence or two, his eye flashed and his 
* voice swelled into a bolder note, as he uttered some 
emphatic thought ; but he instantly fell back into the 
tone of earnest conversation, which ran throughout 
the great body of his speech. A single circumstarLce 
will show you the clearness and absorbing power of 
his arg^ument. 

" I observed that Judge Story, at the opening of 
the case, had prepared himself, pen in hand, as if to 
take copious minutes. Hour after hour I saw him 
fixed in the same attitude, but, so far as I could per- 
ceive, with not a note on his paper. The argument 
closed, and / could 7iot discover that he had taken a 
single note. Others around me remarked the same 
thing ; and it was among the on dits of Washington, 
that a friend spoke to him of the fact with surprise, 
when the Judge remarked, ' Every thing was so clear, 
and so easy to remember, that not a note seemed 
necessary, and, in fact, I thought little or nothing 
about my notes.' 

" The argument ended. Mr. Webster stood for 
some moments silent before the Court, while every 
eye was fixed intently upon him. At length, ad- 
dressing the Chief Justice, Marshall, he proceeded 
thus : — 

" ' This^ Sir, is my case I It is the case, not merely 
of that humble institution, it is the case of every 
College in our land. It is more. It is the case of 
every Eleemosynary Institution throughout our coun- 
try, — of all those great charities founded by the piety 

18 



274 EULOGY ON DANIEL WEBSTER. 

of our ancestors to alleviate human misery, and scatter 
blessings along the pathway of life. It is more ! It 
is, in some sense, the case of every man among us who 
has property of which he may be stripped ; for the 
question is simply this : Shall our State Legislatures 
be allowed to take that which is not their own, to turn 
it from its original use, and apply it to such ends or 
purposes as they, in their discretion, shall see fit! 

" ' Sir, you may destroy this little Institution ; it is 
vreak ; it is in your hands ! I know it is one of the 
lesser lights in the literary horizon of our country. 
You may put it out. But if you do so, you must 
carry through your work ! You must extinguish, 
one after another, all those great lights of science 
v^^hich, for more than a century, have thrown their 
radiance over our land ! 

" ' It is. Sir, as I have said, a small College. And 
yet there are those who love it ' — 

" Here the feelings which he had thus far suc- 
ceeded in keeping down broke forth. His lips quiv- 
ered ; his firm cheeks trembled with emotion ; his 
eyes were filled with tears, his voice choked, and he 
seemed struggling to the utmost simply to gain that 
mastery over himself which might save him from an 
unmanly burst of feeling. I will not attempt to give 
you the few broken words of tenderness in which he 
went on to speak of his attachment to the College. 
The whole seemed to be mingled throughout with the 
recollections of father, mother, brother, and all the 
trials and privations through which he had made his 
wa}^ into life. Every one saw that it was wholly un- 
premeditated, a pressure on his heart, which sought 
relief in words and tears. 



i 



EULOGY ON DANIEL WEBSTER. 275 

" The court-room during these two or three min- 
utes presented an extraordinary spectacle. Chief 
Justice Marshall, with his tall and gaunt figure bent 
j over as if to catch the slightest whisper, the deep 
furrows of his cheek expanded with emotion, and 
eyes suffused with tears ; Mr. Justice Washington at 
his side, — with his small and emaciated frame, and 
countenance more like marble than I ever saw on any 
other human being, — leaning forward with an eager, 
troubled look ; and the remainder of the Court, at 
the two extremities, pressing, as it were, toward a 
single point, while the audience below were wrapping 
themselves round in closer folds beneath the bench 
to catch each look, and every movement of the 
speaker's face. If a painter could give us the scene 
on canvas, — those forms and countenances, and Dan- 
iel Webster as he then stood in the midst, it would 
be one of the most touching pictures in the history 
of eloquence. One thing it taught me, that the 
pathetic depends not merely on the words uttered, 
but still more on the estimate we put upon him who 
utters them. There was not one among the strong- 
minded men of that assembly who could think it un- 
manly to weep, when he saw standing before him the 
man who had made such an argument, melted into 
the tenderness of a child. 

" Mr. Webster had now recovered his composure, 
and fixing his keen eye on the Chief Justice, said, in 
that deep tone with which he sometimes thrilled the 
heart of an audience, — 

" ' Sir, I know not how others may feel,' (glancing 
at the opponents of the College before him,) ' but, for 
myself, when I see my Alma Mater surrounded, like 



11 

276 EULOGY ON DANIEL WEBSTER. 



Caesar in the senate-house, by those who are reiterat- 
ing stab upon stab, I would not, for this right hand, 
have her turn to me, and say, Et tu quoque^ mi jili! 
And tliou too^ my son ! ' 

" He sat down. There was a deathlike stillness 
throughout the room for some moments ; every one 
seemed to be slowly recovering himself, and coming 
gradually back to his ordinary range of thought and 
feeling." 

It was while Mr. Webster was ascending through 
the long gradations of the legal profession to its high- 
est rank, that by a parallel series of display on a 
stage, and in parts totally distinct, by other studies, 
thoughts, and actions, he rose also to be at his death 
the first of American statesmen. The last of the 
mighty rivals was dead before, and he stood alone. 
Give this aspect also of his greatness a passing glance. 
His public life began in May, 1813, in the House of 
Representatives in Congress, to which this State had 
elected him. It ended when he died. If you except 
the interval between his removal from New Hamp- 
shire and his election in Massachusetts, it was a pub- 
lic life of forty years. By what political morality, 
and by what enlarged patriotism, embracing the 
whole country, that life was guided, I shall consider 
hereafter. Let me now fix your attention rather on 
the magnitude and variety and actual value of the 
service. Consider that from the da}'" he went upon 
the Committee of Foreign Relations, in 1813, in time 
of war, and more and more, the longer he lived and 
the higher he rose, he was a man whose great talents 
and devotion to public duty placed and kept him in 
a position of associated or sole command ; command 



1 



EULOGY ON DANIEL WEBSTER. 277 

in the political connection to which he belonged, 
command in ojDposition, command in power ; and 
appreciate the responsibilities which that implies, 
what care, what prudence, what mastery of the whole 
ground, — exacting for the conduct of a party, as 
Gibbon says of Fox, abilities and civil discretion 
equal to the conduct of au empire. Consider the 
work he did in that life of forty years — the range of 
subjects investigated and discussed; composing the 
whole theory and practice of our organic and admin- 
istrative politics, foreign and domestic : the vast body 
of instructive thought he produced and put in pos- 
session of the country ; how much he achieved in 
Congress as well as at the bar, to fix the true inter- 
pretation, as well as to impress the transcendent value 
of the Constitution itself, as much altogether as any 
jurist or statesman since its adoption ; how much to 
establish in the general mind the great doctrine 
that the government of the United States is a gov- 
ernment proper, established by the people of the 
States, not a compact between sovereign communi- 
ties, — that within its limits it is supreme, and that 
whether it is within its limits or not, in any given 
exertion of itself, is to be determined by the Supreme 
Court of the United States — the ultimate arbiter in 
the last resort — from which there is no appeal but 
to revolution ; how much he did in the course of the 
discussions which grew out of the proposed mission 
to Panama, and, at a later day, out of the removal 
of the deposits, to place the executive department of 
the government on its true basis, and under its true 
limitations ; to secure to that department all its just 
powers on the one hand, and on the other hand to 



1 



278 EULOGY ON DANIEL WEBSTER. 

vindicate to the legislative department, and especially 
to the Senate, all that belong to them ; to arrest the 
tendencies which he thought at one time threatened 
to substitute the government of a single will, of a 
single person of great force of character and bound- 
less popularity, and of a numerical majority of the 
people, told by the head, without intermediate insti- 
tutions of any kind, judicial or senatorial, in place of 
the elaborate system of checks and balances, by which 
the Constitution aimed at a government of laws, and 
not of men ; how much, attracting less popular atten- 
tion, but scarcely less important, to complete the 
great work which experience had shown to be left 
unfinished by the judiciary act of 1789, by providing 
for the punishment of all crimes against the United 
States ; how much for securing a safe currency and a 
true financial system, not only by the promulgation 
of sound opinions, but by good specific measures 
adopted, or bad ones defeated ; how much to develop 
the vast material resources of the country, and to 
push forward the planting of the West — not troubled 
by any fear of exhausting old States — by a liberal 
policy of public lands, by vindicating the constitu- 
tional power of Congress to make or aid in making 
large classes of internal improvements, and by acting 
on that doctrine uniformly from 1813, whenever a 
road was to be built, or a rapid suppressed, or a canal 
to be opened, or a breakwater or a lighthouse set up 
above or below^ the flow of the tide, if so far beyond 
the ability of a single State, or of so wide utility to 
commerce and labor as to rise to the rank of a work 
general in its influences — another tie of union be- 
cause another proof of the beneficence of union; 



4 



EULOGY ON DANIEL WEBSTER. 2T9 

how mucli to protect the vast mechanical and manu- 
facturing interests of the country, a value of many 
hundreds of millions — after having been lured into 
existence against his counsels, against his science of 
political economy, by a policy of artificial encourage- 
ment — from being sacrificed, and the pursuits and 
plans of large regions and communities broken up, 
and the acquired skill of the country squandered by 
a sudden and capricious withdrawal of the promise 
of the government ; how much for the right perform- 
ance of the most delicate and difficult of all tasks, 
the ordering of the foreign affairs of a nation, free, 
sensitive, self-conscious, recognizing, it is true, public 
law and a morality of the State, binding on the con- 
science of the State, yet aspiring to power, eminence, 
and command, its whole frame filled full and all on 
fire with American feeling, sympathetic with liberty 
everywhere — how much for the right ordering of the 
foreign affairs of such a State — aiming in all his 
policy, from his speech on the Greek question in 
1823, to his letters to M. Hulsemann in 1850, to 
occupy the high, plain, yet dizzy ground which sepa- 
rates influence from intervention, to avow and pro- 
mulgate warm good-will to humanity, wherever 
striving to be free, to inquire authentically into the 
history of its struggles, to take official and avowed 
pains to ascertain the moment when its success may 
be recognized, consistently, ever, with the great code 
that keeps the peace of the world, abstaining from 
every thing that shall give any nation a right under 
the law of nations to utter one word of complaint, 
still less to retaliate by war — the sympatliy, but also 
the neutrality, of Washington — how much to com- 



280 EULOGY ON DANIEL WEBSTER. 

pose with honor a concurrence of difficulties with the 
first power in the world, which any thing less than 
the highest degree of discretion, firmness, ability, and 
means of commanding respect and confidence at home 
and abroad would inevitably have conducted to the 
last calamity — a disputed boundary line of many 
hundred miles, from the St. Croix to the Rocky 
Mountains, which divided an exasperated and im- 
practicable border population, enlisted the pride and 
affected the interests and controlled the politics of 
particular States, as well as pressed on the peace and 
honor of the nation, which the most popular admiiiis- 
trations of the era of the quietest and best public 
feelings, the times of Monroe and of Jackson, could 
not adjust ; which had grown so complicated with 
other topics of excitement that one false step, right 
or left, would have been a step down a precipice — 
this line settled for ever — the claim of Eno-land to 
search our ships for the suppression of the slave- 
trade silenced for ever, and a new engagement entered 
into by treaty, binding the national faith to contrib- 
ute a specific naval force for putting an end to the 
great crime of man — the long practice of England 
to enter an American ship and impress from its crew, 
terminated for ever ; the deck henceforth guarded 
sacredly and completely by the flag — how much by 
profound discernment, by eloquent speech, by devoted 
life to strengthen the ties of Union, and breathe the 
fine and strong spirit of nationality through all our 
numbers — how much, most of all, last of all, after 
the war with Mexico, needless if his counsels had 
governed, had ended in so vast an acquisition of ter- 
ritory, in presenting to the two great antagonistic 



EULOGY ON DANIEL WEBSTER. 281 

sections of our country so vast an area to enter on, 
so imperial a prize to contend for, and the accursed 
fraternal strife had begun — how much then, when 
rising to the measure of a true and difficult and rare 
greatness, remembering that he had a country to save 
as well as a local constituency to gratify, laying all 
the wealth, all the hopes, of an illustrious life on the 
altar of a hazardous patriotism, he sought and won 
the more exceeding glory which now attends — which 
in the next age shall more conspicuously attend — 
his name who composes an agitated and saves a sink- 
ing land — recall this series of conduct and influ- 
ences, study them carefully in their facts and results 
— the reading of years — and you attain to a true 
appreciation of this aspect of his greatness — his 
public character and life. 

For such a review the eulogy of an hour Jias no 
room. Such a task demands research, details, proofs, 
illustrations, a long labor, — a volume of history, 
composed according to her severest laws, — setting 
down nothing, depreciating nothing, in malignity to 
the dead ; suppressing nothing, and falsifying noth- 
ing, in adulation of the dead ; professing fidelity in- 
corrupt, unswerved by hatred or by love, yet able to 
measure, able to gloAV in the contemplation of a true 
greatness, and a vast and varied and useful public life ; 
such a history as the genius and judgment and delicate 
private and public morality of Everett, assisted by his 
perfect knowledge of the facts, — not disqualified by 
his long friendship, unchilled to the last hour, — such 
a history as he might construct. 

Two or three suggestions, occurring on the most 
general observation of this aspect of his eminence, 
you will tolerate as I leave the topic. 



282 EULOGY ON DANIEL WEBSTER. 

Remark how very large a proportion of all this 
class of his acts are wholly beyond and outside of 
the profession of the law ; demanding studies, expe- 
rience, a turn of mind, a cast of qualities and charac- 
ter, such as that profession neither gives nor exacts. 
Some single speeches in Congress, of consummate 
ability, have been made by great lawyers, drawing 
for -the purpose only on the learning, accomplish- 
ments, logic, and eloquence of the forum. Such was 
Chief Justice, then Mr. Marshall's argument in the 
case of Jonathan Robbins, — turning on the inter- 
pretation of a treaty, and the constitutional power 
of the executive ; a demonstration, if there is any in 
Euclid, anticipating the masterly judgments in the 
cause of Dartmouth College, or of Gibbons and Ogden, 
or of Maculloch and the State of Maryland ; but such 
an one as a lawyer like him — if another there was — 
could have made, in his professional capacity, at the 
bar of the House, although he had never reflected on 
practical politics an hour in his life. Such, some- 
what, was William Pinkney's speech in the House of 
Representatives, on the treaty-making power, in 1815, 
and his two more splendid displays in the Senate, on 
the Missouri question, in 1820, — the last of which I 
heard Mr. Clay pronounce the greatest he ever heard. 
They were pieces of legal reasoning on questions of 
constitutional law, decorated, of course, by a rhetoric 
which Hortensius might have envied, and Cicero 
would not have despised ; but they were professional 
at last. To some extent this is true of some of Mr. 
Webster's ablest speeches in Congress ; or, more 
accurately, of some of the more important portions 
of some of his ablest. I should say so of a part of 



EULOGY ON DANIEL WEBSTER. 283 

that on the Panama Mission ; of the reply to Mr. 
Hayne, even ; and of almost the whole of that reply 
to Mr. Calhoun on the thesis, "the Constitution not 
a compact between sovereign States ; " the whole 
series of discussion of the constitutional power of the 
executive, and the constitutional power of the senate, 
growing out of the removal of the deposits and the 
supposed tendencies of our system towards a central- 
ization of government in a President, and a majority 
of the people, — marked, all of them, by amazing 
ability. To these the lawyer who could demonstrate 
that the charter of this College is a contract within 
the Constitution, or that the steamboat monopoly 
usurped upon the executed power of Congress to 
regulate commerce, was already equal ; but to have 
been the leader, or of the leaders, of his political con- 
nection for thirty years ; to have been able to instruct 
and guide on every question of policy, as well as law, 
which interested the nation in all that time ; every 
question of finance, of currency, of the lands, of the 
development and care of our resources and labor ; to 
have been of strength to help to lead his country by 
the hand up to a position of influence and attraction 
on the highest places of earth, yet to keep her peace 
and to keep her honor ; to have been able to emulate 
the prescriptive and awful renown of the founders of 
States, by doing something which will be admitted, 
when some generations have passed, even more than 
now, to have contributed to preserve the State, — for 
all this another man was needed, and he stands forth 
another and the same. 

I am hereafter to speak separately of the political 
morality which guided him ever ; but I would say a 



284 EULOGY ON DANIEL WEBSTER. 

word now on two portions of his public life, one of 
which has been the subject of accusatory, the other 
of disparaging, criticism, — unsound, unkind, in both 
instances. 

The first comprises his course in regard to a pro- 
tective policy. He opposed a tariff of protection, it 
is said, in 1816 and 1820 and 1824 ; and he opposed, 
in 1828, a sudden and fatal repeal of such a tariff ; 
and thereupon I have seen it written that " this 
proved him a man with no great, comprehensive ideas 
of political economy ; who took the fleeting interests 
and transient opinions of the hour for his norms of 
conduct ; " '^ who had no sober and serious convic- 
tions of his own." I have seen it more decorously 
written, " that his opinions on this subject were not 
determined by general principles, but by a considera- 
tion of immediate sectional interests." 

I will not answer this by what Scaliger says of 
Lipsius, the arrogant pedant, who dogmatized on the 
deeper politics as he did on the text of Tacitus and 
Seneca. Neque est poUticus ; nee jjotest quicquam in 
poUtid ; nihil possunt pedantes in ipsis 7'ehus : nee ego, 
nee alius doetus possumus scribere in politieis. I say 
only that the case totally fails to give color to the 
charge. The reasonings of Mr. Webster in 1816, 
1820, and 1824, express that, on mature reflection 
and due and appropriate study, he had embraced the 
opinion that it was needless and unwise to force 
American manufactures, by regulation, prematurely 
to life. Bred in a commercial community ; taught 
from his earliest liours of thought to regard the care 
of commerce as, in point of fact, a leading object and 
cause of the Union ; to observe around him no other 



EULOGY ON DANIEL WEBSTER. 285 

forms of material industry than those of commerce, 
navigation, fisheries, agriculture, and a few plain and 
robust mechanical arts, he would come to the study 
of the political economy of the subject with a certain 
preoccupation of mind, perhaps ; so coming, he did 
study it at its well-heads, and he adopted his conclu- 
sions sincerely, and announced them strongly. 

His opinions were overruled by Congress ; and a 
national policy was adopted, holding out all conceiv- 
able promises of permanence, under which vast and 
sensitive investments of capital were made ; the ex- 
pectations, the emploj^ments, the habits, of whole 
ranges of States were recast ; and industry, new to 
us, springing, immature, had been advanced just so 
far that, if deserted at that moment, there must fol- 
low a squandering of skill, a squandering of property, 
an aggregate of destruction, senseless, needless, and 
unconscientious, — such as marks the worst form of 
revolution. On these facts, at a later day, he thought 
that that industry, the child of government, should 
not thus capriciously be deserted. " The duty of 
the government," he said, "at the present moment 
would seem to be to preserve, not to destroy ; to main- 
tain the position which it has assumed ; and, for one, 
I shall feel it an indispensable obligation to hold it 
steady, as far as in my power, to that degree of pro- 
tection which it has undertaken to bestow." 

And does this prove that these original opinions 
were hasty, shallow, insincere, unstudied ? Consist- 
ently with every one of them ; consistently with the 
true spirit and all the aims of the science of political 
economy itself ; consistently with every duty of sober, 
high, earnest, and moral statesmanship, might not he 



286 EULOGY ON DANIEL WEBSTER. 

who resisted the making of a tariff in 1816 deprecate 
its abandonment in 1828 ? Does not Adam Smith 
himself admit that it is " ynatter fit for deliberation 
how far, or in what manner, it may be proper to re- 
store that free importation after it has been for some 
time interrupted " ? implying that a general principle 
of national wealth may be displaced or modified by 
special circumstances ; but would these censors, 
therefore, cry out that he had no " great and com- 
prehensive ideas of political economy," and was will- 
ing to be " determined, not by general principles, 
but by immediate interests " ? Because a father 
advises his son against an early and injudicious mar- 
riage, does it logically follow, or is it ethically right, 
that, after his advice has been disregarded, he is to 
recommend desertion of the young wife and the young 
child ? I do not appreciate the beauty and " compre- 
hensiveness " of those scientific ideas which foro^et 
that the actual and vast "interests" of the com- 
munity are exactly what the legislator has to pro- 
tect ; that the concrete of things must limit the 
foolish wantonness of a priori theory ; that that de- 
partment of politics which has for its object the pro- 
motion and distribution of the wealth of nations may 
very consistently and very scientifically preserve Avhat 
it would not have created. He who accuses Mr. Web- 
ster in this behalf of " having no sober and serious 
convictions of his own " must afford some other proof 
than his opposition to the introduction of a policy, 
and then his willingness to protect it after it had been 
introduced, and five hundred millions of property, or, 
however, a countless sum, had been invested under 
it, or become dependent on its continuance. 



EULOGY ON DANIEL WEBSTER. 287 

I should not think that I consulted his true fame, 
if I did not add that as he came to observe the prac- 
tical workings of the protective policy more closely 
than at first he had done ; as he came to observe the 
working and influences of a various manufacturing 
and mechanical labor ; to see how it employs and 
develops every faculty ; finds occupation for every 
hour ; creates or diffuses and disciplines ingenuity, 
gathering up every fragment of mind and time so that 
nothing be lost ; how a steady and ample home mar- 
ket assists agriculture ; how all the great employ- 
ments of man are connected by a kindred tie, so that 
the tilling of the land, navigation, foreign, coastwise, 
and interior commerce, all grow with the growth, and 
strengthen with the strength of the industry of the arts» 
— he came to appreciate, more adequately than at first, 
how this form of labor contributes to wealth, power, 
enjoyment, a great civilization ; he came more justly 
to grasp the conception of how consummate a destruc- 
tion it would cause — how senseless, how unphilo- 
sophical, how immoral — to arrest it suddenly and 
capriciously — after it had been lured into life ; how 
wiser, how far traer to the principles of the science 
which seeks to augment the wealth of the State, to 
refuse to destroy so immense an accumulation of that 
wealth ! In this sense, and in this way, I believe his 
opinions were matured and modified ; but it does not 
quite follow that they were not, in every period, con- 
scientiously formed and held, or that they were not 
in the actual circumstances of each period philosoph- 
ically just, and practically wise. 

The other act of his public life to which I alluded 
is his negotiation of the Treaty of Washington, in 



288 EULOGY ON DANIEL WEBSTER. 

1842, with Great Britain. This act, the country, the 
world, has judged, and has applauded. Of his ad- 
ministrative ability, his discretion, temper, civil cour- 
age, his power of exacting respect and confidence 
from those with whom he communicated, and of influ- 
encing their reason ; his knowledge of the true inter- 
ests and true grandeur of the two great parties to the 
negotiation : of the States of the Union more imme- 
diately concerned, and of the world whose chief con- 
cern is peace ; and of the intrepidity with which he 
encountered the disappointed feelings, and disparag- 
ing criticisms of the hour, in the consciousness that 
he had done a good and large deed, and earned a 
permanent and honest renown — of these it is the 
truest and most fortunate single exemplification which 
remains of him. Concerning its difiQculty, impor- 
tance, and merits of all sorts, there were at the time 
few dissenting opinions among those most conversant 
with the subject, although there were some ; to-day 
there are fewer still. They are so few — a single 
sneer by the side of his grave, expressing that " a 
man who makes such a bargain is not entitled to any 
great glory among diplomatists," is all that I can call 
to mind — that I will not arrest the course of your 
feelings here and now by attempting to refute that 
" sneer " out of the history of the hour and scene. 
" Standing here," he said, in April, 1846, in the Sen- 
ate of the United States, to which he had returned — 
" standing here to-day, in thi^ Senate, and speaking 
in behalf of the administration of which I formed a 
part, and in behalf of the two houses of Congress 
who sustained that administration, cordially and 
effectively, in every thing relating to this treaty, I am 



EULOGY ON DANIEL WEBSTER. 289 

willing to appeal to the public men of the age, whether 
in 1842, and in the city of Washington, something was 
not done for the suppression of crime ; for the true 
exposition of the principles of public law; for the 
freedom and security of commerce on the ocean, and 
for the peace of the world ! " In that forum the 
appeal has been heard, and the praise of a diplomatic 
achievement of true and permanent glory, has been 
irreversibly awarded to him. Beyond that forum of 
the mere "public men of the age," by the larger 
jurisdiction, the general public, the same praise has 
been awarded. Sunt hie etiam sua prcemia laudi. 
That which I had the honor to say in the Senate, in 
the session of 1843, in a discussion concerning this 
treaty, is true and applicable, now as then. " Why 
should I, or why should any one, assume the defence 
of a treaty here in this body, which but just now, on 
the amplest consideration, in the confidence and calm- 
ness of executive session, was approved by a vote so 
decisive ? Sir, the country, by a vote far more deci- 
sive, in a proportion very far beyond thirty-nine to 
nine, has approved your approval. Some there are, 
some few — I speak not now of any member of this 
Senate — restless, selfish, reckless, ' the cankers of a 
calm world and a long peace,' pining with thirst of 
notoriety, slaves to their hatred of England, to whom 
the treaty is distasteful ; to whom any treaty, and all 
things but the glare and clamor, the vain pomp and 
hollow circumstance of war — all but these would be 
distasteful and dreary. But the country is with you 
in this act of wisdom and glory ; its intelligence ; its 
morality ; its labor ; its good men ; the thoughtful ; 
the philanthropic ; the discreet ; the masses, are with 

19 



290 EULOGY ON DANIEL WEBSTER. 



II 



you." " It confirms the purpose of the wise and good || 
of both nations to be for ever at peace Avith one an- 
other, and to put away for ever all war from the kin- 
dred races : war the most ridiculous of blunders ; the 
most tremendous of crimes ; the most comprehensive 
of evils." 

And now to him who in the solitude of his library 
depreciates this act, first, because there was no danger 
of a war with England, I answer that according to 
the overwhelming weight of that kind of evidence by 
which that kind of question must be tried, that is, 
by the judgment of the great body of well-informed 
public men at that moment in Congress ; in the gov- 
ernment ; in diplomatic situation — our relations to 
that power had become so delicate, and so urgent, 
that, unless soon adjusted by negotiation, there was 
real danger of war. Against such evidence, what is 
the value of the speculation of a private person, ten 
years afterwards, in the shade of his general studies, 
whatever his sagacity ? The temper of the border 
population ; the tendencies to disorder in Canada, 
stimulated by sympathizers on our side of the line ; 
the entrance on our territory of a British armed force 
in 1837 ; cutting The Caroline out of her harbor, and 
sending her down the falls ; the arrest of jNIcLeod in 
1841, a British subject, composing part of that force, 
by the government of New York, and the threat to 
hang him, which a person high in office in England ■ 
declared, in a letter which was shown to me, would 
raise a cry for war from " whig, radical, and tory " 
which no ministry could resist ; growing irritation 
caused by the search of our vessels under color of 
suppressing the slave-trade ; the long controversy, 



EULOGY ON DANIEL WEBSTER. 291 

almost as old as the government, about the boundary 
line — so conducted as to have at last convinced each 
disputant that the other was fraudulent and insin- 
cere ; as to have enlisted the pride of States ; as to 
have exasperated and agitated a large line of border ; 
as to have entered finally into the tactics of political 
parties, and the schemes of ambitious men, out-bid- 
ding, out-racing one another in a competition of clamor 
and vehemence ; a controversy on which England, a 
European monarchy, a first-class power, near to the 
great sources of the opinion of the world, by her 
press, her diplomacy, her universal intercourse, had 
taken great pains to persuade Europe that our claim 
was groundless and unconscientious, — all these 
; things announced to near observers in public life a 
crisis at hand which demanded somethincr more than 
" any sensible and honest man " to encounter ; assur- 
ing some glory to him who should triumph over it. 
One such observer said, " Men stood facing each other 
with guns on their shoulders, upon opposite sides of 
fordable rivers, thirty yards Avide. The discharge of 
a single musket would have brought on a war whose 
fires would have encircled the globe." 

Is this act disparaged next because what each party 
had for sixty years claimed as the true line of the old 
treaty was waived, a line of agreement substituted, 
and equivalents given and taken for gain or loss? 
But herein you will see only, what the nation has 
seen, the boldness as well as sagacity of Mr. Web- 
ster. When the award of the king of the Nether- 
lands, proposing a line of agreement, was offered to 
President Jackson, that strong will dared not accept 
it in the face of the party politics of Maine — al- 



292 EULOGY ON DANIEL WEBSTER. 

though he advised to offer her the value of a million 
of dollars to procure her assent to an adjustment 
which his own mind approved. What he dared not 
do inferred some peri], I suppose. Yet the experi- 
ence of twenty ye^i'S — of sixty }' ears — should have 
taught all men — had taught many who shrank from 
acting on it, that the Gordian knot must be cut, not 
unloosed ; that all further attempt to find the true 
line must be abandoned as an idle and perilous diplo- 
macy ; and that a boundary must be made by a bar- 
gain worthy of nations, or must be traced by the 
point of the bayonet. The merit of Mr. Webster is, 
first, that he dared to open the negotiation on this 
basis. I say the boldness. For appreciate the do- 
mestic diificulties which attended it. In its nature it 
proposed to give up something which we had thought 
our own for half a century ; to cede of the territory 
of more than one State ; it demanded, therefore, the 
assent of those States by formal act, committing the 
State, parties in power unequivocally ; it was to be 
undertaken not in the administration of Monroe, — 
elected by the whole people, — not in the adminis- 
tration of Jackson, whose vast popularity could carry 
any thing, and withstand any thing ; but just Avhen 
the death of President Harrison had scattered his 
party; had alienated hearts; had severed ties and 
dissolved connections indispensable to the strength 
of administration, creating a loud call on Mr. Web- 
ster to leave the Cabinet, — creating almost the ap- 
pearance of an unwillingness that he should contribute 
to its glory even by largest service to the State. 

Yet consider finally how he surmounted every dif- 
ficulty. I will not say with Lord Palmerston, in 



EULOGY ON DANIEL WEBSTER. 293 

parliament, that there was '' nobody in England who 
did not admit it a very bad treaty for England." 
But I may repeat what I said on it in the senate in 
1843. "And, now, what does the world see? An 
adjustment concluded by a special minister at Wash- 
ington, by which four fifths of the value of the whole 
subject in controversy is left to you as your own ; 
and by which, for that one fifth which England 
desires to possess, she pays you over and over, in 
national equivalents, imperial equivalents, such as a 
nation may give, such as a nation ma}^ accept, satis- 
factory to your interests, soothing to your honor, — 
the navigation of the St. John, — a concession the 
value of which nobody disputes, — a concession not 
to Maine alone, but to the whole country, — to com- 
merce, to navigation, as far as winds bloAV or waters 
roll, — an equivalent of inappreciable value, opening 
an ample path to the sea, — an equivalent in part 
for what she receives of the territory in dispute, — 
a hundred thousand acres in New Hampshire ; fifty 
thousand acres in Vermont and New York ; the point 
of land commanding the great military way to and 
from Canada by Lake Champlain ; the fair and fertile 
island of St. George ; the surrender of a pertinacious 
pretension to four millions of acres westward of Lake 
Superior. Sir, I will not say that this adjustment 
admits, or was designed to admit, that our title to 
the whole territory in controversy was perfect and 
indisputable. I will not do so much injustice to the 
accomplished and excellent person who represented 
the moderation and the good sense of the English 
Government and people in this negotiation. I can- 
not adopt, even for the defence of a treaty which I 



I 



294 EULOGY ON DANIEL WEBSTER. 



I 

SO much approve, the language of a writer in the 
'London Morning Chronicle' of September last, — 
who has been said to be Lord Palmerston, — which 
over and over asserts, substantially as his lordship 
certainly did in parliament, that the adjustment ' vir- 
tually acknowledges the American claim to the whole 
of the disputed territory,' and that ' it gives England 
no share at all, — absolutely none ; for the capitula- 
tion virtually and practically yields up the whole 
territory to the United States, and then brings back 
a small part of it in exchange for the right of navi- 
gating the St. John.' I will not say this. But I say 
first, that by concession of everybody it is a better 
treaty than the administration of President Jackson 
would have most eagerly concluded, if by the offer of 
a million and a quarter acres of land they could have 
procured the assent of Maine to it. That treaty she 
rejected ; this she accepts ; and I disparage nobody 
when I maintain that on all parts and all aspects of 
this question, — national or state, military or indus- 
trial, — her opinion is worth that of the whole coun- 
try beside. I say next that the treaty admits the 
substantial justice of your general claim. It admits 
that in its utmost exte^it it was plausible, formidable, 
and made in pure good faith. It admits before the 
nations that we have not been rapacious ; have not 
made false clamor ; that we have asserted our own, 
and obtained our own. Adjudging to 3'ou the pos- 
session of four fifths indisputably, she gives you for 
the one fifth which you concede equivalents, — given 
as equivalents — eo nomine^ — on purpose to soothe 
and save the point of honor ; whose intrinsical and 
comparative value is such that you may accept them 



EULOGY ON DANIEL WEBSTER. 295 

as equivalents without reproach to your judgment, or 
your firmness, or your good faith, — whose intrinsical 
and comparative value, tried by the maxims, weighed 
in the scales of imperial traffic, make them a compen- 
sation over and over again for all we concede." 

But I linger too long upon his public life, and 
upon this one of its great acts. With what profound 
conviction of all the difficulties which beset it ; with 
what anxieties for the issue, hope and fear alternately 
preponderating, he entered on that extreme trial of 
capacity and good fortune, and carried it through, 
I shall not soon forget. As if it were last night, I 
recall the time when, after the senate had ratified it 
in an evening executive session — by a vote of thirty- 
nine to nine — I personally carried to him the result, 
at his own house, and in presence of his wife. Then, 
indeed, the measure of his glory and happiness seemed 
full. In the exuberant language of Burke, " I stood 
near him ; and his face, to use the expression of the 
Scripture of the first martyr, was as if it had been 
the face of an angel. ' Hope elevated, and joy bright- 
ened his crest.' I do not know how others feel ; but 
if I had stood in that situation, I would not have ex- 
changed it for all that kings or people could bestow." 

Such eminence and such hold on the public mind as 
he attained demands extraordinary general intellectual 
power, adequate mental culture, an impressive, attrac- 
tive, energetic, and great character, and extraordinary 
specific power also of influencing the convictions and 
actions of others by speech. These all he had. 

That in the quality of pure and sheer power of 
intellect he was of the first class of men is, I think, 
the universal judgment of all who have personally 



296 EULOGY ON DANIEL WEBSTER. 

witnessed many of his higher displays, and of all who 
witliout that opportunity have studied his life in its 
actions and influences, and studied his mind in its 
recorded thoughts. Sometimes it has seemed to me 
that to enable one to appreciate with accuracy, as a 
psychological speculation, the intrinsic and absolute 
volume and texture of that brain, — the real rate and 
measure of those abilities, — it was better not to see 
or hear him, unless you could see or hear him fre- 
quently, and in various modes of exhibition ; for 
undoubtedly there was something in his countenance 
and bearing so expressive of command, — something 
even in his conversational language when saying, 
parva summisse et modica temperate^ so exquisitely 
plausible, embodying the likeness at least of a rich 
truth, the forms at least of a large generalization, in 
an epithet, — an antithesis, — a pointed phrase, — a 
broad and peremptory thesis, — and something in his 
grander forth-putting, when roused by a great sub- 
ject or occasion exciting his reason and touching his 
moral sentiments and his heart, so difficult to be re- 
sisted, approaching so near, going so far beyond, the 
higher style of man ; that although it left you a very 
good witness of his power of influencing others, you 
were not in the best condition immediately to pro- 
nounce on the quality or the source of the influence. 
You saw the flash and heard the peal, and felt the 
admiration and fear ; but from what region it was 
launched, and by what divinity, and from what 
Olympian seat, you could not certainly yet tell. To 
do that you must, if you saw him at all, see him 
many times ; compare him with himself, and with 
others ; follow his dazzling career from his father's 



EULOGY ON DANIEL WEBSTER. 297 

house ; observe from what competitors he won those 
laurels ; study his discourses, — study them by the 
side of those of other great men of this country and 
time, and of other countries and times, conspicuous 
in the same fields of mental achievement, — look 
through the crystal water of the style down to the 
golden sands of the thought ; anal3'ze and contrast 
intellectual power somewhat; consider what kind 
and what quantity of it has been held by students of 
mind needful in order to great eminence in the higher 
mathematics, or metaphysics, or reason of the law ; 
what capacity to analyze, through and through, to 
the jDrimordial elements of the truths of that sci- 
ence ; yet what wisdom and sobriety, in order to con- 
trol the wantonness and shun the absurdities of a 
mere scholastic logic, by systematizing ideas, and 
combining them, and repressing one by another, thus 
producing — not a collection of intense and conflict- 
ing paradoxes, but — a code — scientifically coherent 
and practically useful, — consider what description 
and what quantity of mind have been held needful 
by students of mind in order to conspicuous emi- 
nence — long maintained — in statesmanship; that 
great practical science, that great philosophical art, 
whose ends are the existence, happiness, and honor 
of a nation ; whose truths are to be drawn from the 
widest survey of man, — of social man, — of the par- 
ticular race and particular community for which a 
government is to be made or kept, or a policy to be 
provided ; '' philosophy in action," demanding at 
once or affording place for the highest speculative 
genius and the most skilful conduct of men and of 
affairs ; and finally consider what degree and kind of 



298 EULOGY ON DANIEL WEBSTER. 

mental power has been found to be required in order 
to influence the reason of an audience and a nation 
by speech, — not magnetizing the mere nervous or 
emotional nature by an effort of that nature, — but 
operating on reason by reason — a great reputation 
in forensic and deliberative eloquence, maintained 
and advancing for a lifetime, — it is thus that we 
come to be sure that his intellectual power was as 
real and as uniform as its very happiest particular 
display had been imposing and remarkable. 

It was not quite so easy to analyze that power, to 
compare or contrast it with that of other mental ce- 
lebrities, and show how it differed or resembled, as it 
was to discern its existence. 

Whether he would have excelled as much in other 
fields of exertion — in speculative philosoph}^, for ex- 
ample, in any of its departments — is a problem impos- 
sible to determine and needless to move. To me it 
seems quite clear that the whole wealth of his powers, 
his whole emotional nature, his eloquent feeling, his 
matchless capacity to affect others' conduct by affecting 
their practical judgments, could not have been known, 
could not have been poured forth in a stream so rich 
and strong and full, could not have so reacted on and 
aided and winged the mighty intelligence, in any other 
walk of mind, or life, than that he chose ; that in any 
other there must have been some disjoining of qualities 
which God had united, — some divorce of pure intel- 
lect from the helps or liindrances or companionship of 
common sense and beautiful genius ; and that in any 
field of speculative ideas, but half of him, or part of 
him, could have found its sphere. What that part 
might have been or done, it is vain to inquire. 



I 



EULOGY ON DANIEL WEBSTER. 299 

I have been told that the assertion has been haz- 
arded that he " was great in understanding ; deficient 
in the large reason;" and to prove this distinction 
he is compared disadvantageously with " Socrates ; 
Aristotle ; Plato ; Leibnitz ; Newton ; and Descartes." 
If this means that he did not devote his mind, such 
as it \Aas, to their speculations, it is true ; but that 
would not prove that he had not as much " higher 
reason." Where was Bacon's higher reason when he 
was composing his reading on the Statute of Uses ? 
Had he lost it ? or was he only not employing it ? or 
was he employing it on an investigation of law ? If 
it means that he had not as much absolute intellectual 
power as they, or could not, in their departments, 
have done what they did, it may be dismissed as a 
dogma incapable of proof and incapable of refuta- 
tion ; ineffectual as a disparagement ; unphilosophical 
as a comparison. 

It is too common with those who come from the 
reveries of a cloistered speculation to judge a practi- 
cal life, to say of him, and such as he, that they " do 
not enlarge universal law, and first principles ; and 
philosophical ideas ; " that " they add no new maxim 
formed by induction out of human history and old 
thought." In this there is some truth ; and yet it 
totally fails to prove that they do not possess all the 
intellectual power, and all the specific form of intel- 
lectual power, required for such a description of 
achievement ; and it totally fails, too, to prove that 
they do not use it quite as truly to " the glory of 
God, and the bettering of man's estate." Whether 
they possess such power or not, the evidence does not 
disprove ; and it is a pedantic dogmatism, if it is not 



300 EULOGY ON DANIEL WEBSTER. 

a malignant dogmatism, which, from such evidence^ 
pronounces that they do not ; but it is doubtless so, 
that by an original bias, by accidental circumstances 
or deliberate choice, he determined early to devote 
himself to a practical and great duty, and that was 
to uphold a recent, delicate, and complex political 
system, which his studies, his sagacity, taught him, 
as Solon learned, was the best the people could bear ; 
to uphold it ; to adapt its essential principles and its 
actual organism to the great changes of his time ; the 
enlarging territory ; enlarging numbers ; sharper an- 
tagonisms ; mightier passions ; a new nationality ; 
and under it, and by means of it, and by a steady 
government, a wise policy of business, a temperate 
conduct of foreign relations, to enable a people to 
develop their resources, and fulfil their mission. This 
he selected as his work on earth ; this his task ; this, 
if well done, his consolation, his joy, his triumph ! 
To this, call it, in comparison with the meditations of 
philosophy, humble or high, he brought all the vast 
gifts of intellect, whatever they were, wherewith God 
had enriched him. And now, do they infer that, 
because he selected such a work to do he could not 
have possessed the higher form of intellectual power ; 
or do they say that, because, having selected it, he 
performed it with a masterly and uniform sagacity 
and prudence and good sense, using ever the appro- 
priate means to the selected end ; that therefore he 
could not have possessed the higher form of intellectual 
power ? Because all his life long he recognized that 
his vocation was that of a statesman and a jurist, not 
that of a thinker and dreamer in the shade, still less 
of a general agitator ; that his duties connected them- 



EULOGY ON DANIEL WEBSTER. 301 

selves mainly with an existing stupendous political 
order of things, to be kept — to be adapted with all 
possible civil discretion and temper to the growth of 
the nation — but by no means to be exchanged for 
any quantit}'- of amorphous matter in the form of 
"universal law " or new maxims and great ideas born 
since the last change of the moon — because he quite 
habitually spoke the language of the Constitution 
and the law, not the phraseology of a new philoso- 
phy ; confining himself very much to inculcating 
historical, traditional, and indispensable maxims, — 
neutrality ; justice ; good faith ; observance of fun- 
damental compacts of Union and the like — because 
it was America — our America — he sought to pre- 
serve, and to set forward to her glory — not so much 
an abstract conception of humanity — because he 
could combine many ideas ; many elements ; many 
antagonisms ; in a harmonious, and noble practical 
politics, instead of fastening on one only, and — that 
sure sign of small or perverted ability — aggravating 
it to disease and falsehood, — is it therefore inferred 
that he had not the larger form of intellectual power ? 
And this power was not oppressed, but aided and 
accomplished by exercise the most constant, the most 
severe, the most stimulant, and by a force of will as 
remarkable as his genius, and by adequate mental 
and tasteful culture. How much the eminent great- 
ness it reached is due to the various and lofty compe- 
tition to which he brought, if he could, the most 
careful preparation — competition with adversaries 
cum quibus certare erat gloriosius, qiiam omnino adver- 
sarios non habere^ cum proesertim non modo^ nunquam 
sit aut illorum ab ipso cursus impeditus, aut ab ipsis 



302 EULOGY ON DANIEL WEBSTER. 

8uus^ sed contra semper alter ah altera adjutus, et com- 
municando^ et monendo, et favendo^ you may well ap- 
preciate. 

I claim much, too, under the name of mere mental 
culture. Remark his style. I allow its full weight 
to the Horatian maxim, scrihendi recte sapere est et 
prineipium et fons^ and I admit that he had deep and 
exquisite judgment, largely of the gift of God. But 
such a style as his is due also to art, to practice, — in 
the matter of st34e, incessant, — to great examples 
of fine writing, turned by the nightly and the daily 
hand ; to Cicero, through whose pellucid, deep seas 
the pearl shows distinct and large and near, as if 
within the arm's reach ; to Virgil, whose magic of 
words, whose exquisite structure and " lich economy 
of expression," no other writer ever equalled ; to our 
English Bible, and especially to the prophetical writ- 
ings, and of these especially to Ezekiel, of some of 
whose peculiarities, and among them that of the repe- 
tition of single words or phrases, for emphasis and 
impression, a friend has called my attention to some 
very striking illustrations ; to Shakspeare, of the style 
of whose comic dialogue we may, in the language of 
the great critic, assert "that it is that which in the 
English nation is never to become obsolete, a certain 
mode of phraseology so consonant and congenial to 
analogy, to principles of the language, as to remain 
settled and unaltered, — a style above grossness, 
below modish and pedantic forms of speech, where 
propriety resides ; " to Addison, whom Johnson, Mack- 
intosh, and Macaulay concur to put at the head of 
all fine writers, for the amenity, delicacy, and un- 
ostentatious elegance of his English ; to Pope, pol- 



EULOGY ON DANIEL WEBSTER. 303 

ished, condensed, sententious ; to Johnson and Burke, 
in whom all the affluence and all the energy of our 
tongue, in both its great elements of Saxon and Latin, 
might be exemplified ; to the study and comparison, 
but not the copying, of authors such as these ; to 
liabits of writing and speaking and conversing on 
the capital theory of alwaj^s doing his best, — thus, 
somewhat, I think, was acquired that remarkable 
production, " the last work of combined study and 
genius," his rich, clear, correct, harmonious, and 
w^eighty style of prose. 

Beyond these studies and exercises of taste, he had 
read variously and judiciously. If any public man, 
or any man, had more thoroughly mastered British 
constitutional and general history, or the history of 
British legislation, or could deduce the progress, 
eras, causes, and hindrances of British liberty in more 
prompt, exact, and copious detail, or had in his mem- 
ory, at any given moment, a more ample political 
biograph}^, or political literature, I do not know him. 
His library of English history, and of all history, was 
always rich, select, and catholic; and I well recollect 
hearing him, in 1819, while attending a commence- 
ment of this College, at an evening party, sketch, 
with great emphasis and interest of manner, the mer- 
its of George Buchanan, the historian of Scotland, — 
his Latinity and eloquence almost equal to Livy's, his 
love of liberty and his genius greater, and his title to 
credit not much worse. American history and Amer- 
ican political literature he had by heart. The long 
series of influences that trained us for representative 
and free government ; that other series of influences 
which moulded us into a united government, — the 



304 EULOGY ON DANIEL WEBSTER. 

colonial era, the age of controversy before the Revo- 
lution ; every scene and every person in that great 
tragic action, the age of controversy following the 
Revolution, and preceding the Constitution, unlike 
the earlier, in which we divided among ourselves on 
the greatest questions which can engage the mind of 
America, — the questions of the existence of a na- 
tional government, of the continued existence of 
the State governments, on the partition of powers, 
on the umpirage of disputes between them, — a con- 
troversy^ on which the destiny of the New World was 
staked ; every problem which has successively en- 
gaged our politics, and every name which has figured 
in them, — the whole stream of our time was open, 
clear, and present ever to his eye. 

I think, too, that, though not a frequent and am- 
bitious citer of authorities, he had read, in the course 
of the study of his profession or politics, and had 
meditated all the great writers and thinkers by whom 
the principles of republican government, and all free 
governments, are most authoritatively expounded. 
Aristotle, Cicero, Machiavel, — one of whose dis- 
courses on Livy maintains, in so masterly an argu- 
ment, how much wiser and more constant are the 
people than the prince, a doctrine of liberty consola- 
tory and full of joy, — Harrington, Milton, Sydney, 
Locke, I know he had read and weighed. 

Other classes of information there were, — ■ partly 
obtained from books, partly from observation, to -some 
extent referable to his two main emj^loyments of 
politics and law, — by which he was distinguished 
remarkably. Thus, nobody but was struck with his 
knowledge of civil and physical geography, and, to a 



EULOGY ON DANIEL WEBSTER. 305 

less extent, of geology and races ; of all the great 
routes and marts of our foreign, coastwise, and in- 
terior commerce, the subjects which it exchanges, the 
whole circle of industry it comprehends and passes 
around ; the kinds of our mechanical and manufac- 
turing productions, and their relations to all labor 
and life ; the history, theories, and practice of agri- 
culture, — our own and that of other countries, — 
and its relations to government, liberty, happiness, 
and the character of nations. This kind of informa- 
tion enriched and assisted all his public efforts ; but 
to appreciate the variety and accuracy of his knowl- 
edge, and even the true compass of his mind, you 
must have had some familiarity with his friendly 
written correspondence, and you must have conversed 
with him with some degree of freedom. There, more 
than in senatorial or forensic debate, gleamed the 
true riches of his genius, as well as the goodness of 
his large heart, and the kindness of his noble nature. 
There, with no longer a great part to discharge, no 
longer compelled to weigh and measure propositions, 
to tread the dizzy heights which part the antagonisms 
of the Constitution, to put aside allusions and illus- 
trations which crowded on his mind in action, but 
I which the dignity of a public appearance had to re- 
ject, in the confidence of hospitality, which ever he 
dispensed as a prince who also was a friend, his mem- 
ory — one of his most extraordinary faculties, quite 
in proportion to all the rest — swept free over the 
readings and labors of more than half a century; 
and then, allusions, direct and ready quotations, a 
passing, mature criticism, sometimes only a recollec- 
tion of the mere emotions which a glorious passage 

20 



306 EULOGY ON DANIEL WEBSTER. 

II 

or interesting event had once excited, darkening for 
a moment the face and filling the eye, often an in- 
structive exposition of a current maxim of philosophy 
or politics, the history of an invention, the recital of 
some incident casting a new light on some transac- 
tion or some institution, — this flow of unstudied 
conversation, quite as remarkable as any other ex- 
hibition of his mind, better than any other, perhaps, 
at once opened an unexpected glimpse of his various 
acquirements, and gave you to experience, delightedly, 
that the "mild sentiments have their eloquence as 
well as the stormy passions." 

There must be added, next, the element of an im- 
pressive character, inspiring regard, trust, and ad- 
miration, not unmingled with love. It had, I think, 
intrinsically a charm such as belongs only to a good, 
noble, and beautiful nature. In its combination with 
so much fame, so much force of will, and so much 
intellect, it filled and fascinated the imagination and 
heart. It Avas affectionate in childhood and youth, 
and it was more than ever so in the few last months 
of his long life. It is the universal testimony that 
he gave to his parents, in largest measure, honor, 
love, obedience ; that he eagerly appropriated the first 
means which he could command to relieve the father 
from the debts contracted to educate his brother and 
himself ; that lie selected his first jDlace of professional 
practice that he might soothe the coming on of his 
old age ; that all through life he neglected no occa- 
sion — sometimes when leaning on the arm of a 
friend, alone, with faltering voice, sometimes in the 
presence of great assemblies, where the tide of gen- 
eral emotion made it graceful — to express his "affec- 



EULOGY ON DANIEL WEBSTER. 307 

tionate veneration of hira who reared and defended 
the log cabin in which his elder brothers and sisters 
were born, against savage violence and destruction, 
cherished all the domestic virtues beneath its roof, 
and, through the fire and blood of some years of 
revolutionary war, shrank from no danger, no toil, no 
sacrifice, to serve his country, and to raise his chil- 
dren to a condition better than his own." 

Equally beautiful was his love of all his kindred 
and of all his friends. When I hear him accused of 
selfishness, and a cold, bad nature, I recall him lying 
sleej^less all night, not without tears of boyhood, con- 
ferring with Ezekiel how the darling desire of both 
hearts should be compassed, and he, too, admitted 
to the precious privileges of education ; courageously 
pleading the cause of both brothers in the morning ; 
prevailing by the wise and discerning affection of the 
mother ; suspending his studies of the law, and regis- 
tering deeds and teaching school to earn the means, 
for both, of availing themselves of the opportunity 
which the parental self-sacrifice had placed within 
their reach ; loving him through life, mourning him 
when dead, with a love and a sorrow very wonderful, 
passing the sorrow of woman ; I recall the husband, 
the father of the living and of the early departed, 
the friend, the counsellor of many years, and my 
heart grows too full and liquid for the refutation of 
words. 

His affectionate nature, craving ever friendship, as 
well as the presence of kindred blood, diffused itself 
through all his private life, gave sincerity to all his 
hospitalities, kindness to his eye, warmth to the press- 
ure of his hand ; made his greatness and genius 



308 EULOGY ON DANIEL WEBSTER. 

unbend themselves to the playfuhiess of childhood, 
flowed out in graceful memories indulged of the past 
or the dead, of incidents when life was young and 
promised to be happy, — gave generous sketches of 
his rivals, — the high contention now hidden by the 
handful of earth, — hours passed fifty years ago with 
great authors, recalled for the vernal emotions which 
then they made to live and revel in the soul. And 
from these conversations of friendship, no man — no 
man, old or young — went away to remember one 
word of profaneness, one allusion of indelicacy, one 
impure thought, one unbelieving suggestion, one 
doubt cast on the reality of virtue, of patriotism, 
of enthusiasm, of the progress of man, — one doubt 
cast on righteousness, or temperance, or judgment 
to come. 

Every one of his tastes and recreations announced 
the same type of character. His love of agriculture, 
of sports in the open air, of the outward world in 
starlight and storms, and sea and boundless wilder- 
ness, — partly a result of the influences of the first 
fourteen years of his life, perpetuated like its other 
affections and its other lessons of a mother's love, — 
the Psalms, the Bible, the stories of the wars, — 
partly the return of an unsophisticated and healthful 
nature, tiring, for a space, of the idle business of 
political life, its distinctions, its artificialities, to em- 
ployments, to sensations which interest without agi- 
tating the universal race alike, as God has framed it, 
in which one feels himself only a man, fashioned 
from the earth, set to till it, appointed to return to 
it, yet made in the image of his Maker, and with a 
spirit that shall not die, — all displayed a man whom 



EULOGY ON DANIEL WEBSTER. 809 

the most various intercourse with the world, the 
longest career of strife and honors, the consciousness 
of intellectual supremacy, the coming in of a wide 
fame, constantly enlarging, left, as he was at first, 
natural, simple, manly, genial, kind. 

You will all concur, I think, wdth a learned friend 
who thus calls my attention to the resemblance of his 
character, in some of these particulars, to that of 
Walter Scott: — 

''Nature endowed both with athletic frames, and a 
noble presence ; both passionately loved rural life, 
its labors and sports ; possessed a manly simplicity, 
free from all affectation, genial and social tastes, full 
minds, and happy elocution ; both stamped themselves 
with indelible marks upon the age in which they lived ; 
both were laborious, and always with high and vir- 
tuous aims, ardent in patriotism, overflowing with 
love of ' kindred blood,' and, above all, frank and 
unostentatious Christians." 

I have learned by evidence the most direct and 
satisfactory, that in the last months of his life, the 
whole affectionateness of his nature ; his consideration 
of others ; his gentleness ; his desire to make them 
happy and to see them happy, seemed to come out in 
more and more beautiful and habitual expression than 
ever before. The long day's public tasks were felt 
to be done ; the cares, the uncertainties, the mental 
conflicts of high place, were ended ; and he came 
home to recover himself for the few years which he 
might still expect would be his before he should go 
hence to be here no more. And there, I am assured 
and fully believe, no unbecoming regrets pursued 
him ; no discontent, as for injustice suffered or expec- 



310 EULOGY ON DANIEL WEBSTER 

tations unfulfilled ; no self-reproach for any thing 
done or any thing omitted by himself ; no irritation, 
no peevishness unworthy of his noble nature ; but 
instead, love and hope for his country, when she be- 
came the subject of conversation ; and for all around 
him, the dearest and most indifferent, for all breath- 
ing things about him, the overflow of the kindest 
heart growing in gentleness and benevolence ; pater- 
nal, patriarchal affections, seeming to become more 
natural, warm, and communicative every hour. Softer 
and yet brighter grew the tints on the sky of parting 
day ; and the last lingering rays, more even than the 
glories of noon, announced how divine was the source 
from which they j^roceeded ; how incapable to be 
quenched ; how certain to rise on a morning which 
no night should follow. 

Such a character was made to be loved. It was 
loved. Those who knew and saw it in its hour of 
calm — those who could repose on that soft green — 
loved liim. His plain neighbors loved him ; and one 
said, when he was laid in his grave, " How lonesome 
the world seems ! " Educated young men loved him. 
The ministers of the gospel, the general intelligence 
of the country, the masses afar off, loved him. True, 
they had not found in his speeches, read by millions, 
so much adulation of the people ; so much of the 
music which robs the public reason of itself; so many 
phrases of humanity and philanthropy; and some 
had told them he was lofty and cold, — solitary in 
his greatness ; but every year they came nearer and 
nearer to him, and as they came nearer, they loved 
him better ; they heard how tender the son had been, 
the husband, the brother, the father, the friend, and 



EULOGY ON DANIEL WEBSTER. 311 

neighbor ; that he was plain, simple, natural, generous, 
hospitable, — the heart larger than the brain ; that he 
loved little children and reverenced God, the Scrip- 
tures, the Sabbath-day, the Constitution, and the 
law, — and their hearts clave unto him. More truly 
of him than even of the great naval darling of Eng- 
land might it be said, that " his presence would set 
the church-bells ringing, and give school-boys a holi- 
day, — would bring children from school and old 
men from the chimney-corner, to gaze on him ere he 
died." The great and unavailing lamentation first 
revealed the deep place he had in the hearts of his 
countrymen. 

You are now to add to this his extraordinary power 
of influencing the convictions of others b}^ speech, and 
you have completed the survey of the means of his 
greatness. And here, again, I begin, by admiring 
an aggregate, made up of excellences and triumphs, 
ordinarily deemed incompatible. He spoke with 
consummate ability to the bench, and yet exactly as, 
according to every sound canon of taste and ethics, 
the bench ought to be addressed. He spoke with 
consummate ability to the jury, and yet exactly as, 
according to every sound canon, that totally different 
tribunal ought to be addressed. In the halls of con- 
gress, before the people assembled for political dis- 
cussion in masses, before audiences smaller and more 
select, assembled for some solemn commemoration of 
the past or of the dead, — in each of these, again, 
his speech, of the first form of ability, was exactly 
adapted, also, to the critical proprieties of the place ; 
each achieved, when delivered, the most instant and 
specific success of eloquence, — some of them in a 



4 

312 EULOGY ON DANIEL WEBSTER. 1 

splendid and remarkable degree ; and yet, stranger 
still, when reduced to writing, as they fell from his 
lips, they compose a body of reading, — in many vol 
umes, — solid, clear, rich, and full of harmony, — a 
classical and permanent political literature. 

And yet all these modes of his eloquence, exactly 
adapted each to its stage and its end, were stamped 
with his image and superscription, identified by 
characteristics incapable to be counterfeited, and 
impossible to be mistaken. The same high power of 
reason, intent in every one to explore and display 
some truth ; some truth of judicial, or historical, or 
biographical fact ; some truth* of law, deduced by 
construction, perhaps, or by illation ; some truth of 
policy, for want whereof a nation, generations, may 
be the worse, — reason seeking and unfolding truth ; 
the same tone, in all, of deep earnestness, expressive 
of strong desire that that which he felt to be impor- 
tant should be accepted as true, and spring up to 
action ; the same transparent, plain, forcible, and 
direct speech, conveying his exact thought to the 
mind, — not something less or more ; the same sov- 
ereignty of form, of brow, and eye, and tone, and 
manner, — everywhere the intellectual king of men, 
standing before you, — that same marvellousness of 
qualities and results, residing, I know not where, in 
Avords, in pictures, in the ordering of ideas, in felici- | 
ties indescribable, by means whereof, coming from 
his tongue, all things seemed mended, — truth seemed 
more true, probability more plausible, greatness more 
grand, goodness more awful, every affection more 
tender than when coming from other tongues, — 
these are, in all, his eloquence. But sometimes it 



EULOGY ON DANIEL WEBSTER. 313 

became individualized, and discriminated even from 
itself ; sometimes place and circumstances, great in- 
terests at stake, a stage, an audience fitted for the 
highest historic action, a crisis, personal or national, 
upon him, stirred the depths of that emotional nature, 
as the anger of the goddess stirs the sea on which the 
great epic is beginning ; strong passions, themselve? 
kindled to intensity, quickened ever}^ faculty to a 
new life ; the stimulated associations of ideas brought 
all treasures of thought and knowledge within com- 
mand, the spell, which often held his imagination 
fast, dissolved, and she arose and gave him to choose 
of her urn of gold ; earnestness became vehemence, 
the simple, perspicuous, measured, and direct lan- 
guage became a headlong, full, and burning tide of 
speech; the discourse of reason, wisdom, gravity, and 
beauty, changed to that AeLvorr)^^ that raiest consum- 
mate eloquence, — grand, rapid, pathetic, terrible ; 
the aliqiiid immensum infinitumque that Cicero might 
have recognized ; the master triumph of man in the 
rarest opportunity of his noblest power. 

Such elevation above himself, in congressional de- 
bate, was most uncommon. Some such there were 
in the great discussions of executive power following 
the removal of the deposits, which they who heard 
them will never forget, and some which rest in the 
tradition of hearers only. But there were other 
fields of oratory on which, under the influence of 
more uncommon springs of inspiration, he exempli- 
fied, in still other forms, an eloquence in which I do 
not know that he has had a superior among men. 
Addressing masses by tens of thousands in the open 
air, on the urgent political questions of the day, or 



314 EULOGY ON DANIEL WEBSTER. 

designated to lead the meditations of an hour devoted 
to the remembrance of some national era, or of some 
incident marking the progress of the nation, and 
lifting him up to a view of what is, and what is past, 
and some indistinct revelation of the glory that lies 
in the future, or of some great historical name, just 
borne by the nation to his tomb, — we have learned 
that then and there, at the base of Bunker Hill, be- 
fore the corner-stone was laid, and again when from 
the finished column the centuries looked on him ; in 
Faneuil Hall, mourning for those with whose spoken 
or written eloquence of freedom its arches had so 
often resounded ; on the rock of Plymouth ; before 
the capitol, of which there shall not be one stone left 
on another, before his memory shall have ceased to 
live, — in such scenes, unfettered by the laws of 
forensic or parliamentary debate ; multitudes un- 
counted lifting up their eyes to him ; some great his- 
torical scenes of America around ; all symbols of her 
glory and art and power and fortune there ; voices 
of the past, not unheard ; shapes beckoning from the 
future, not unseen, — sometimes that mighty intel- 
lect, borne upAvards to a height and kindled to an 
illumination which we shall see no more, wrought 
out, as it were, in an instant, a picture of vision, 
warning, prediction ; the progress of the nation ; the 
contrasts of its eras ; the heroic deaths ; the motives 
to patriotism ; the maxims and arts imperial by 
which the glory has been gathered and may be 
heightened, — wrought out, in an instant, a picture 
to fade only when all record of our mind shall die. 

In looking over the public remains of his oratory, 
it is striking to remark how, even in that most sober 



EULOGY ON DANIEL WEBSTER. 315 

and massive understanding and nature, you see gath- 
ered and expressed the characteristic sentiments and 
the passing time of our America. It is the strong 
old oak which ascends before you ; yet our soil, our 
heaven, are attested in it as perfectly as if it were a 
flower that could grow in no other climate and in no 
other hour of the year or day. Let me instance in 
one thing only. It is a peculiarity of some schools 
of eloquence that they embody and utter, not merely 
the individual genius and character of the speaker, 
but a national consciousness, — a national era, a 
mood, a hope, a dread, a despair, — in which you 
listen to the spoken history of the time. There is an 
eloquence of an expiring nation, such as seems to 
sadden the glorious speech of Demosthenes ; such as 
breathes grand and gloomy from the visions of the 
prophets of the last days of Israel and Judah ; such 
as gave a spell to the expression of Grattan and of 
Kossuth, — the SAveetest, most mournful, most awful 
of the words which man may utter, or which man 
may hear, — the eloquence of a perishing nation. 
There is another eloquence, in which the national 
consciousness of a young or renewed and vast 
strength, of trust in a dazzling, certain, and limit- 
less future, an inward glorying in victories yet to be 
won, sounds out as by voice of clarion, challenging to 
contest for the highest prize of earth ; such as that in 
which the leader of Israel in its first days holds up 
to the new nation the Land of Promise ; such as that 
which in the well imagined speeches scattered by 
Livy over the history of the " majestic series of vic- 
tories " speaks the Roman consciousness of growing 
aggrandizement which should subject the world ; 



816 EULOGY ON DANIEL WEBSTER. 

such as that through which, at the tribunes of her 
revolution, in the bulletins of her rising soldier, 
France told to the world her dream of glory. And 
of this kind somewhat is ours ; cheerful, hopeful, 
trusting, as befits youth and spring ; the eloquence of 
a State beginning to ascend to the first class of power, 
eminence, and consideration, and conscious of itself. 
It is to no purpose that they tell you it is in bad 
taste ; that it partakes of arrogance and vanity ; that 
a true national good breeding would not know, or 
seem to know, whether the nation is old or young ; 
whether the tides of being are in their flow or ebb ; 
whether these coursers of the sun are sinking slowly 
to rest, wearied with a journey of a thousand years, 
or just bounding from the Orient unbreathed. Higher 
laws than those of taste determine the consciousness 
of nations. Higher laws than those of taste deter- 
mine the general forms of the expression of that con- 
sciousness. Let the downward age of America find 
its orators and poets and artists to erect its spirit, or 
grace and soothe its dying ; be it ours to go up with 
Webster to the rock, the monument, the capitol, and 
bid " the distant generations hail ! " 

In this connection remark, somewhat more gener- 
ally, to how extraordinary an extent he had by his 
acts, words, thoughts, or the events of his life, associ- 
ated himself for ever in the memory of all of us, with 
every historical incident, or at least with every his- 
torical epoch ; with every policy ; with every glory ; 
with every great name and fundamental institution, 
and grand or beautiful image, which are peculiarly 
and properly American. Look backwards to the 
planting of Plymouth and Jamestown ; to the vari- 



EULOGY ON DANIEL WEBSTER. 317 

ous scenes of colonial life in peace and war ; to the 
opening and march and close of the revolutionary 
drama, — to the age of the Constitution ; to Wash- 
ington and Franklin and Adams and Jefferson ; to 
the whole train of causes from the Reformation 
downwards, which prepared us to be Republicans ; 
to that other train of causes which led us to be 
Unionists, — look round on field, workshop, and 
deck, and hear the music of labor rewarded, fed, and 
protected, — look on the bright sisterhood of the 
States, each singing as a seraph in her motion, yet 
blending in a common beam and swelling a common 
harmon}^, — and there is nothing which does not 
bring him by some tie to the memory of America. 

"We seem to see his form and hear his deep grave 
speech everywhere. By some felicity of his personal 
life ; by some wise, deep, or beautiful word spoken 
or written ; by some service of his own, or some 
commemoration of the services of others, it has come 
to pass that " our granite hills, our inland seas and 
prairies, and fresh, unbounded, magnificent wilder- 
ness ; " our encircling ocean ; the resting-place of 
the Pilgrims ; our new-born sister of the Pacific ; our 
popular assemblies ; our free schools ; all our cher- 
ished doctrines of education, and of the influence of 
religion, and material policy and law, and the Con- 
stitution, give us back his name. AVhat American 
landscape will you look on ; what subject of Ameri- 
can interest will you study ; what source of hope or 
of anxiety, as an American, will you acknowledge 
that it does not recall him ? 

I have reserved, until I could treat it as a separate 
and final topic, the consideration of the morality of 



318 EULOGY ON DANIEL WEBSTER. 

Mr. Webster's public character and life. To his true 
fame, — to the kind and degree of influence which 
that large series of great actions and those embodied 
thoughts of great intellect are to exert on the future, 
— this is the all-important consideration. In the last 
speech which he made in the Senate, — the last of 
those which he made, as he said, for the Constitution 
and the Union, and which he might have commended, 
as Bacon his name and memory " to men's charitable 
speeches, to foreign nations, and the next ages," — 
yet with a better hope he asserted, " The ends I aim 
at shall be those of my Countr}^, my God, and Truth." 
Is that praise his ? 

Until the seventh day of March, 1850, I think it 
would have been accorded to him by an almost uni- 
versal acclaim, as general and as expressive of pro- 
found and intelligent conviction, and of enthusiasm, 
love, and trust, as ever saluted conspicuous states- 
manship, tried by many crises of affairs in a great 
nation, agitated ever by parties, and wholly free. 

That he had admitted into his heart a desire to 
win, by deserving them, the highest forms of public 
honor, many would have said ; and they who loved 
him most fondly, and felt the truest solicitude that 
he should carry a good conscience and pure fame 
brightening to the end, would not have feared to con- 
cede. For he was not ignorant of himself; and he 
therefore knew that there was nothing within the 
Union, Constitution, and Law, too high or too large 
or too difficult for him. He believed that his natural 
or his acquired abilities, and his policy of adminis- 
tration, would contribute to the true glory of Amer- 
ica ; and he held no theory of ethics which required 



EULOGY ON DANIEL WEBSTER. 319 

him to disparage, to suppress, to ignore vast capaci- 
ties of public service merely because they were his 
own. If the fleets of Greece were assembling, and 
her tribes buckling on their arms from Laconia to 
Mount Olj'mpus, from the promontory of Sunium to 
the isle farthest to the west, and the great epic action 
was opening, it was not for him to feign insanity or 
idiocy, to escape the perils and the honor of com- 
mand. But that all this in him had been ever in 
subordination to a principled and beautiful public 
virtue ; that every sectional bias, every party tie, as 
well as every personal aspiring, had been uniformly 
held by him for nothing against the claims of coun- 
try ; that nothing lower than country seemed worthy 
enough — nothing smaller than country large enough 
— for that great heart, would not have been ques- 
tioned by a whisper. Ah ! if at any hour before that 
day he had died, how would then the great procession 
of the people of America — the great triumphal pro- 
cession of the dead — have moved onward to his 
grave — the sublimity of national sorrow, not con- 
trasted, not outraged by one feeble voice of calumny I 
In that antecedent public life, embracing from 1812 
to 1850 — a period of thirty-eight years — I find 
grandest proofs of the genuineness and comprehen- 
siveness of his patriotism, and the boldness and man- 
liness of his public virtue. He began his career of 
politics as a Federalist. Such was his father — so 
beloved and revered ; such his literary and profes- 
sional companions ; such, although by no very deci- 
sive or certain preponderance, the community in 
which he was bred and was to live. Under that name 
of party he entered Congress, personally, and by 



320 EULOGY ON DANIEL WEBSTER. 



« 



connection, opposed to the war, which was thought 
to bear with such extreme sectional severity upon the I 
North and East. And yet one might almost say that ' 
tlie only thing he imbibed from Federalists or Fed- 
eralism was love and admiration for the Constitution 
as the means of union. That passion he did inherit 
from them ; that he cherished. 

He came into Congress, opposed, as I have said, to 
the war ; and behold him, if you would judge of the 
quality of his political ethics, in opposition. Did 
those eloquent lips, at a time of life when vehemence 
and imprudence are expected, if ever, and not un- 
graceful, let fall ever one word of faction ? Did he 
ever deny one power to the general government, 
which the soundest expositors of all creeds have 
allowed it ? Did he ever breathe a syllable which 
could excite a region, a State, a family of States, 
against the Union, — which could hold out hope or 
aid to the enemy ? — which sought or tended to turn 
back or to chill the fiery tide of a new and intense 
nationality, then bursting up, to flow and burn till 
all things appointed to America to do shall be ful- 
filled ? These questions, in their substance, he put 
to Mr. Calhoun, in 1838, in the Senate, and that 
great man — one of the authors of the war — just 
then, only then, in relations unfriendly to Mr. Web- 
ster, and who had just insinuated a reproach on his 
conduct in the war, was silent. Did Mr. Webster 
content liimself even with objecting to the details of 
the mode in which the administration waged the war ? 
No, indeed. Taught by his constitutional studies 
that the Union was made in part for commerce, 
familiar with the habits of our long line of coast. 



EULOGY ON DANIEL WEBSTER. 321 

knowing well how many sailors and fishermen, driven 
from every sea by embargo and war, burned to go to the 
gun-deck and avenge the long wrongs of England on 
the element where she had inflicted them, his opposi- 
tion to the war manifested itself by teaching the nation 
that the deck was her field of fame. Non illi imperium 
pelagi scevumque trideiitem^ sed nobis, sorte datum. 

But I miglit recall other evidence of the sterling 
and unusual qualities of his public virtue. Look in 
how manly a sort he — not merely conducted a par- 
ticular argument or a particular speech, but in how 
manly a sort, in how high a moral tone, he uniformly 
dealt with the mind of his country. Politicians got 
an advantage of him for this while he lived ; let the 
dead have just praise to-day. Our public life is one 
long electioneering, and even Burke tells you that at 
popular elections the most rigorous casuists will remit 
something of their severity. But where do you find 
him flattering his countrymen, indirectly or directly, 
for a vote ? On what did he ever place himself 
but good counsels and useful service ? His arts were 
manly arts, and he never saw a day of temptation 
when he would not rather fall than stand on any 
other. Who ever heard that voice cheering the peo- 
ple on to rapacity, to injustice, to- a vain and guilty 
glory ? Who ever saw that pencil of light hold up 
a picture of manifest destiny to dazzle the fancy ? 
How anxiously rather, in season and out, by the en- 
ergetic eloquence of his youth, by his counsels be- 
queathed on the verge of a timely grave, he preferred 
to teach that by all possible acquired sobriety of 
mind, by asking reverently of the past, by obedience 
to the law, by habits of patient and legitimate labor, 

21 



I 



322 EULOGY ON DANIEL WEBSTER. -, 

t 

by the cultivation of the mind, by the fear and wor- 
ship of God, we educate ourselves for the future that 
is revealing. Men said he did not sj^mpathize with the 
masses, because his phraseology was rather of an old 
and simple school, rejecting the nauseous and vain 
repetitions of humanity and philanthropy, and prog- 
ress and brotherhood, in which may lurk heresies so 
dreadful, of socialism or disunion ; in which a selfish, 
hollow, and shallow ambition may mask itself, — the 
siren song which would lure the pilot from his course. 
But I say that he did S3anpathize with them ; and, 
because he did, he came to them not with adulation, 
but with truth ; not with words to please, but with 
measures to serve them ; not that his popular sympa- 
thies were less, but that his personal and intellectual 
dignity and his public morality were greater. 

And on the seventh day of March, and down to 
the final scene, might he not still say as ever before, 
that "• all the ends he aimed at were his country's, his 
God's, and truth's." He declared, " I speak to-day 
for the preservation of the Union. Hear me for my 
cause. I speak to-day out of a solicitous and anx- 
ious heart for the restoration to the country of that 
quiet and harmony which make the blessings of this 
Union so rich and so dear to us all. These are the 
motives and the sole motives that influence me." If 
in that declaration he was sincere, was he not bound 
in conscience to give the counsels of that day ? What 
were they ? What was the single one for which his 
political morality was called in question ? Only that 
a provision of the Federal Constitution, ordaining the 
restitution of fugitive slaves, should be executed ac- 
cording to its true meaning. This only. And might 



EULOGY ON DANIEL WEBSTER. 323 

he not in good conscience keep the Constitution in 
this part, and in all, for the preservation of the Union ? 
Under his oath to support it, and to support it all, 
and with his opinions of that duty so long held, pro- 
claimed uniformly, in whose vindication on some great 
days, he had found the chief opportunity of his per- 
sonal glory, might he not, in good conscience support 
it, and all of it, even if he could not — and no human 
intelligence could certainly — know that the extreme 
evil would follow, in immediate consequence, its vio- 
lation ? Was it so recent a doctrine of his that the 
Constitution was obligatory upon the national and 
individual conscience, that jou should ascribe it to 
sudden and irresistible temptation ? Why, what had 
he, quite down to the seventh of March, that more 
truly individualized him ? — w^hat had he more char- 
acteristically his own ? — where Avithal had he to glory 
more or other than all beside, than this very doctrine 
of the sacred and permanent obligation to support 
each and all parts of that great compact of union and 
justice ? Had not this been his distinction, his spe- 
ciality/, — almost the foible of his greatness, — the 
darling and master passion ever ? Consider that that 
was a sentiment which had been part of his conscious 
nature for more than sixty years ; that from the time 
he bought his first copy of the Constitution on the 
handkerchief, and revered parental lips had com- 
mended it to him, with all other holy and beautiful 
things, along with lessons of reverence to God, and 
the belief and love of His Scriptures, along with the 
doctrine of the catechism, the unequalled music of 
Watts, the name of Washington, — there had never 
been an hour that he had not held it the master work 



324 EULOGY ON DANIEL WEBSTER. 

of man, — just in its ethics, consummate in its prac- 
tical wisdom, paramount in its injunctions; that 
every year of life had deepened the original impres- 
sion ; that as his mind opened, and his associations 
widened, he found that every one for whom he felt 
respect, instructors, theological and moral teachers, 
his entire party connection, the opposite party, and 
the whole country, so held it, too ; that its fruits of 
more than half a century of union, of happiness, of 
renown, bore constant and clear witness to it in his 
mind, and that it chanced that certain emergent and 
rare occasions had devolved on him to stand forth 
to maintain it, to vindicate its interpretation, to vin- 
dicate its authority, to unfold its workings and uses ; 
that he had so acquitted himself of that opportunity as 
to have won the title of its Expounder and Defender, 
so that his proudest memories, his most prized re- 
nown, referred to it, and Avere entwined with it — 
and say whether with such antecedents, readiness to 
execute, or disposition to evade, would have been 
the hardest to explain ; likeliest to suggest the sur- 
mise of a new temptation ! He who knows any thing 
of man knows that his vote for beginning the resto- 
ration of harmony by keeping the whole Constitution, 
was determined, was necessitated, by the great law 
of sequences, — a great law of cause and effect, run- 
ning back to his mother's arms, as resistless as the 
hiw which moves the system about the sun, — and 
that he must have given it, although it had been 
opened to him in vision, that within the next natural 
day his " eyes should be turned to behold for the last 
time the sun in heaven." 

To accuse him in that act of " sinning against his 



1 



EULOGY ON DANIEL WEBSTER. 325 

own conscience " is to charge one of tliese things : 
either that no well-instructed conscience can approve 
and maintain the Constitution, and each of its parts, 
and therefore that his, by inference, did not approve 
it ; or that he had never employed the proper means 
of instructing his conscience, and therefore its appro- 
val, if it were given, was itself an immorality. The 
accuser must assert one of these propositions. He 
will not deny, I take it for granted, that the con- 
science requires to be instructed by political teaching, 
in order to guide the citizen, or the public man, 
aright, in the matter of political duties. Will he 
say that the moral sentiments alone, whatever their 
origin — ^vhether factitious and derivative, or parcel 
of the spirit of the child and born with it — that they 
alone, by force of strict and mere ethical training, 
become qualified to pronounce authoritativel}^ whether 
the Constitution, or any other vast and complex civil 
policy, as a whole, whereby a nation is created and 
preserved, ought to have been made, or ought to be 
executed? Will he venture to tell you, that if your 
conscience approves the Union, the Constitution in 
all its parts, and the law which administers it, that 
you are bound to obey and uphold them ; and if it 
disapproves, you must, according to your measure, 
and in your circles of agitation, disobey and subvert 
them, and leave the matter there — forgetting or 
designedly omitting to tell you also that you are 
bound, in all good faith and diligence to resort to 
studies and to teachers ah extra — in order to deter- 
mine whether the conscience ought to approve or 
disapprove the Union, the Constitution, and the law, 
in vieiv of the luhole aggregate of their nature and 



326 EULOGY ON DANIEL WEBSTER. 

fruits ? Does he not perfectly know that this moral 
faculty, however trained, by mere moral institution, 
specifically directed to that end, to be tender, sensi- 
tive, and peremptory, is totally unequal to decide on 
any action or any thing, but the very simplest ; that 
which produces the most palpable and immediate 
result of unmixed good, or unmixed evil ; and that 
when it comes to judge on the great mixed cases of 
the world, where the consequences are numerous, 
their development slow and successive, the light and 
shadow of a blended and multiform good and evil 
spread out on the lifetime of a nation, that then mo- 
rality must borrow from history ; from politics ; from 
reason operating on history and politics, her elemefits of 
determination? I tliink he must agree to this. He 
must agree, I think, that to single out one provision in 
a political system of many parts and of elaborate inter- 
dependence, to take it all alone, exactly as it stands, 
and without attention to its origin and history ; the 
necessities, morally resistless, which prescribed its 
introduction into the system, the unmeasured good in 
other forms which its allowance buys, the unmeas- 
ured evil in other forms which its allowance hinders 
— without attention to these, to present it in all 
''the nakedness of a metaphysical abstraction " to the 
mere sensibilities; and ask if it is not inhuman, and 
if they answer according to their kind, that it is, then 
to say that the problem is solved, and the right of 
disobedience is made clear — he must ag^ree that this 
is not to exalt reason and conscience, but to outrage 
both. He must agree that although the supremacy 
of conscience is absolute whether the decision be 
right or wrong, that is, according to the real qualities 



EULOGY ON DANIEL WEBSTER. 327 

of things or not, that there lies back of the actual 
conscience, and its actual decisions, the great anterior 
duty of having a conscience that shall decide accord- 
ing to the real qualities of things ; that to this vast 
attainment some adequate knowledge of the real 
qualities of the things which are to be subjected to 
its inspection is indispensable ; that if the matter to 
be judged of is any thing so large, complex, and con- 
ventional as the duty of the citizen, or the public 
man, to the State ; the duty of preserving or destroy- 
inof the order of thing^s in which we are born ; the 
duty of executing or violating one of the provisions 
of organic law which the country, having a wide and 
clear view before and after, had deemed a needful in- 
strumental means for the preservation of that order ; 
that then it is not enough to relegate the citizen, or 
the public man, to a higher law, and an interior illu- 
mination, and leave him there. Such discourse is 
" as the stars, which give so little light because they 
are so high." He must agree that in such case mo- 
rality itself should go to school. There must be sci- 
ence as well as conscience, as old Fuller has said. 
She must herself learn of history ; she must learn of 
politics ; she must consult the builders of the State, 
the living and the dead, to know its value, its aspects 
in the long run, on happiness and morals/, its dan- 
gers ; the means of its preservation ; the maxims and 
arts imperial of its glory. To fit her to be the mis- 
tress of civil life, he will agree that she must come 
out for a space from the interior round of emotions, 
and subjective states and contemplations, and intro- 
spection, "cloistered, unexercised, unbreathed," — 
and, carrying with her nothing but her tenderness, 



328 EULOGY ON DANIEL WEBSTER. 

her scrupulosity, and her love of truth, survey the 
objective realities of the State ; ponder thoughtfully 
on the complications, and impediments, and antago- 
nisms which make the noblest politics but an aspiring, 
an approximation, a compromise, a type, a shadow of 
good to come, "the bu3dng of great blessings at 
great prices," — and there learn civil duty secundum 
suhjectam materiam. " Add to your virtue knowl- 
edge " — or it is no virtue. 

And now, is he who accuses Mr. Webster of " sin- 
ning against his own conscience," quite sure that he 
knows, that that conscience, — well instructed by 
profounclest j)olitical studies, and thoughts of the 
reason ; well instructed by an appropriate moral 
institution sedulously applied, did not commend and 
approve his conduct to himself? Does he know 
that he had not anxiously and maturely studied the 
ethics of the Constitution, and as a question of ethics, 
but of ethics applied to a stupendous problem of 
practical life, and had not become satisfied that they 
were rio'ht? Does he know that he had not done 
this, when his faculties were all at their best ; and 
his motives under no suspicion ? May not such an 
inquirer, for aught you can know, may not that great 
mind have verily and conscientiously thought that he 
had learned in that investigation many things ? May 
he not have thought that he learned, that the duty 
of the inhabitants of the free States, in that day's 
extremity, to the republic, the duty at all events 
of statesmen to the republic, is a little too large, 
and delicate, and difficult, to be all comprehended 
in the single emotion of compassion for one class 
of persons in the commonwealth, or in carrying out 



EULOGY ON DANIEL WEBSTER. 329 

the single principle of abstract, and natural, and 
violent justice to one class? May he not have 
thought that he found there some stupendous exem- 
plifications of Avhat we read of, in books of casuistry, 
the " dialectics of conscience," as conflicts of duties ; 
such things as the conflicts of the greater with the 
less; conflicts of the attainable with the visionary; 
conflicts of the real with the seeming ; and may he 
not have been soothed to learn that the evil which 
he found in this part of the Constitution was the 
least of two ; was unavoidable ; was compensated ; 
was justified ; was commanded, as by a voice from 
the Mount, by a more exceeding and enduring good ? 
May he not have thought that he had learned, that 
the grandest, most difficult, most pleasing to God, 
of the achievements of secular wisdom and philan- 
thropy, is the building of a State ; that of the first 
class of grandeur and difiiculty, and acceptableness 
to Him, in this kind, was the building of our own : 
that unless everybody of consequence enough to be 
heard of in the age and generation of Washington, — 
unless that whole age and generation were in a con- 
spiracy to cheat themselves, and history, and pos- 
terity, a certain policy of concession and forbearance 
of region to region, was indispensable to rear that 
master work of man ; and that that same policy of 
concession and forbearance is as indispensable, more 
so, now, to afford a rational ground of hope for its 
preservation ? May he not have thought that he had 
learned that the obligation, if such in any sense you 
may call it, of one State to allow itself to become an 
asjdum for those flying from slavery into another 
State, was an obligation of benevolence, of humanity 



I 



830 EULOGY ON DANIEL WEBSTER. 

only, not of justice ; that it must, therefore, on eth- 
ical principles, be exercised under all the limita- 
tions which regulate and condition the benevolence of 
States ; that therefore each is to exercise it in strict 
subordination to its own interests, estimated by a 
wise statesmanship, and a well-instructed public con- 
science ; that benevolence itself, even its ministra- 
tions of mere good-will, is an affair of measure and 
of proportions ; and must choose sometimes between 
the greater good and the less ; that if, to the highest 
degree, and widest diffusion of human happiness, a 
Union of States such as ours, some free, some not 
so, was necessary ; and to such Union the Constitu- 
tion was necessary ; and to such a Constitution this 
clause was necessary, humanity itself prescribes it, 
and presides in it ? May he not have thought that 
he learned that there are proposed to humanity in 
this world many fields of beneficent exertion ; some 
larger, some smaller, some more, some less expensive 
and profitable to till ; that among these it is always 
lawful, and often indispensable to make a choice ; 
that sometimes, to acquire the right or the ability to 
labor in one, it is needful to covenant not to invade 
another ; and that such covenant, in partial restraint, 
rather in reasonable direction of philanthropy, is 
good in the forum of conscience ; and setting out 
with these very elementary maxims of practical 
morals, may he not have thought that he learned 
from the careful study of the facts of our history and 
opinions, that to acquire the power of advancing the 
dearest interests of man, through generations count- 
less, by that unequalled security of peace and pro- 
gress, the Union ; the power of advancing the interest 



,1 

1 



EULOGY ON DANIEL WEBSTER. 331 

of each State, each region, each relation — the slave 
and the master; the power of subjecting a whole 
continent all astir, and on fire with the emulation of 
young republics; of subjecting it, through ages of 
household calm, to the sweet influences of Christ- 
ianity, of culture, of the great, gentle, and sure re- 
former, time ; that to enable us to do this, to enable us 
to grasp this boundless and ever-renewing harvest of 
philanthropy, it w^ould have been a good bargain — 
that humanity herself would have approved it — to 
have bound ourselves never so much as to look across 
the line into the enclosure of Southern municipal sla- 
very ; certainly never to enter it ; still less, still less, to 

" Pluck its berries harsh and crude, 
And witli forced fingers rude 
Shatter its leaves before the mellowing year." 

Until the accuser who charges him, now that he is 
in his grave, with "having sinned against his con- 
science," will assert that the conscience of a public man 
may not, must not, be instructed by profound knowl- 
edge of the vast subject-matter with which public life 
is conversant — even as the conscience of the mariner 
may be and must be instructed by the knowledge ot 
j navigation ; and that of the pilot by the knowledge 
t of the depths and shallows of the coast; and that of 
i the engineer of the boat and the train, by the knowl- 
' edge of the capacities of his mechanism to achieve a 
proposed velocity ; and will assert that he is certain 
I that the consummate science of our great statesman 
I was felt hy himself to prescribe to his morality another 
' conduct than that Avhich he adopted, and that he 
thus consciously outraged that " sense of duty which 



332 EULOGY ON DANIEL WEBSTER. 

pursues us ever," — is he not inexcusable, whoever he 
is, that so judges another? 

But it is time that this eulogy was spoken. My 
heart goes back into the coffin there with him, and I 
would pause. I went — it is a day or two since — 
alone, to see again the home which he so dearly 
loved, the chamber where he died, the grave in 
which they laid him — all habited as when 

" His look drew audience still as night, 
Or summer's noontide air," 

till the heavens be no more. Throughout tliat spa 
cious and calm scene all things to the eye showed at 
first unchanged. The books in the library, the por- 
traits, the table at which he \Yrote, the scientific 
culture of the land, the course of agricultural occu- 
pation, the coming-in of harvests, fruit of the seed 
his own hand had scattered, the animals and imple- 
ments of husbandry, the trees planted by him in 
lines, in copses, in orchards, by thousands, the seat 
under the noble elm on which he used to sit to feel 
the south-west wind at evening, or hear the breath- 
ings of the sea, or the not less audible music of the 
starry heavens, all seemed at first unchanged. The 
sun of a bright day from which, however, something 
of the fervors of midsummer were wanting, fell tem- 
perately on them all, filled the air on all sides with 
the utterances of life, and gleamed on the long line 
of ocean. Some of those whom on earth he loved 
best, still were there. The great mind still seemed 
to preside ; the great presence to be with you ; you 
might expect to hear again the rich and playful tones 
of the voice of the old hospitality. Yet a moment 



EULOGY ON DANIEL WEBSTER. 333 

more, and all the scene took on the aspect of one 
great monument, inscribed with his name, and sacred 
to his memory. And such it shall be in all the fu- 
ture of America ! The sensation of desolateness, and 
loneliness, and darkness, with which you see it now, 
will pass away ; the sharp grief of love and friendship 
will become soothed ;- men will repair thither as they 
are wont to commemorate the great days of history ; 
the same glance shall take in, and the same emotions 
shall greet and bless, the Harbor of the Pilgrims and 
the Tomb of Webster. 



B34 THE ANNEXATION OF TEXAS. 



SPEECH BEFORE THE YOUNG MEN'S WHIG 
CLUB OF BOSTON, ON THE ANNEXATION 
OF TEXAS. 

DELIVERED IN THE TREMONT TEMPLE, AUGUST 19, 1844. 



I 
t 



[The meeting having been called to order by Charles Francis 
Adams, President of the Club, Mr. Choate was introduced. He 
came forward and spoke as follows : ] 

Mr. President and Gentlemen, — 

I regard the approaching election as one of more 
interest to the whole country, and to the States of 
the North in a preeminent degree, than any which 
has preceded it. The peculiarity of this election is, 
that while it involves all the questions of mere policy, 
which are ever suspended on the choice of a president, 
— questions of the currency, of the lands, of internal 
improvements, of protection, of foreign policy, and all 
else ; while it involves in its broadest extent the 
question, hoiv shall the nation he governed? — it in- 
volves — the first presidential election that has done 
so — the further, more fundamental, and more start- 
ling question, lohat shall the nation he ; ivho shall the 
nation he ; where shall the nation he ; who, what, 
and where, is, and is to be, our country itself ? Is it 
to be any longer the Union which we have known ; 
which we have loved, to which we have been accus- 
tomed ? — or is it to be dissolved altogether ? or is it 



THE ANNEXATION OF TEXAS. 335 

to be a new one, enlarged by the annexation of a 
territory out of which forty States of the size of 
Massachusetts might be constructed ; a territory not 
appended equally to the East, the West, the Centre, 
and the South ; not appended equally to the slave 
States and the free States ; to the agricultural and 
I the planting ; to the localities of free trade and the 
localities of protection ; not so appended as to work 
an equal and impartial enlargement and assistance to 
each one of those various and heteros^'eneous elements 
of interest and sentiment and position out of whose 
struggle comes the peace, out of whose dissonance 
comes the harmony, of our system ; — not so, but 
appended in one vast accession to one side, one 
region, one interest, of the many which compose the 
State ; so appended as to disturb the relations of the 
parts ; to change the seat of the centre ; to counteract 
the natural tendencies of things ; to substitute a revo- 
lution of violent and morbid policy in place of the 
slow and safe action of nature, habit, and business, 
under a permanent law ; so appended, in short, as not 
merely to make a small globe into a larger one, but 
to alter the whole figure of the body ; to vary the 
shape and the range of its orbit ; to launch it forth on 
a new highway of the heavens ; to change its day and 
night, its seed-time and harvest, its solar year, the 
great cycle of its duration itself. 

This it is that gives to this election an interest 
peculiar and transcendent. It is a question, not what 
the policy of the nation shall be, — but what, who, 
where, shall the nation he ! It is not a question 
of national politics, but of national identity. For 
even if the Union shall survive the annexation of 



336 THE ANNEXATION OF TEXAS. 

Texas, and the discussions of annexation, it will be a 
new, a changed, another Union, — not this. It will 
be changed, not by time, which changes all things, — 
man, monuments, states, the great globe itself; not 
by time, but by power ; not by imperceptible degrees, 
but in a day ; not by a successive growth, unfolded 
and urged forward by an organic law, an implanted 
force, a noiseless and invisible nutrition from beneath 
and from without, of which every region, every State, 
takes the risk ; but by the direct action of govern- 
ment — arbitrary, violent, and unjust — of which no 
part has ever agreed to take the risk. It is to this 
element in the present election, the annexation of 
Texas, that I wish to-night, passing over all the rest, 
to direct your attention. 

I shall consume but little of the time of such an 
assembly as this, in attempting to prove that the 
success or failure of this enterprise of annexation is 
suspended — for the present — perhaps for our day — 
on the result of the pending election. You, at least, 
have no doubt on this point. Is there one man now 
before me, in the first place, who does not believe, 
or who does not greatly and rationally fear, that if 
Mr. Polk is the next president, Texas will come in — 
under the unostentatious, and not so very terrible form 
of a territory^ of course, in the first instance — in 
twelve months, unless some great and extraordinary 
interposition of the people should prevent it ? Does 
any one — if such an one may be supposed among you 
to-night — who, opposed to Texas, as you are, has yet 
a hankering for Mr. Polk, and means to vote for him, 
if he can obtain the consent of his conscience — who 
wants to vote for Mr. Polk, but shrinks from the 



I 



THE ANNEXATION OF TEXAS. 337 

idea of promoting annexation — does any such one 
sajs Oh, it doesn't follow that if he is chosen, Texas 
will be annexed ? Be it so ; but does it not increase 
the chances of annexation ? Does it not tremendously 
enhance the difficulties of resistance ? Does it not 
at least expose you to the terrible hazard of being 
compelled, hereafter, to encounter, by memorial, by 
convention, by remonstrance, by extreme and extraor- 
dinary action, that which you can now, peaceably, 
innocently, seasonably anticipate and prevent at the 
polls ? Does not every stock-jobber, and land-jobber, 
and flesh-jobber, who clamors for annexation, under- 
stand perfectly, that he aids his objects b}^ choosing 
Mr. Polk? Are not those honest gentlemen all on 
his side, and do they not well know what they are 
about? Does not Mr. Polk come in — if he comes — 
pledged to annex if he can, and determined to do it 
if he can ? Does he not come in pledged and deter- 
mined to put in requisition the whole vast power of 
the Executive — the whole vast power of the flushed 
party that elects him, and to effect annexation? Is 
any man foolish enough to deny that Mr. Van Bureri 
was cast overboard, and Mr. Polk nominated, ex- 
pressly and solely that the candidate might be, as 
they exquisitely express it, " Texas to the back- 
bone?" — And how can you suppose that, nominated 
for this very purpose, elected for this very purpose, 
he will do nothing to accomplish it? Why, if he 
should be disposed to do nothing, do you think that 
a party or a faction, strong enough to go into a 
National Convention, and there trample instructions 
under foot ; strong enough to force upon the body an 
audacious, not very democratic rule of proceeding, 

22 



338 THE ANNEXATION OF TEXAS. 

which put it out of the power of a majority to nomi- 
nate the choice of a majority ; strong enough to laugh 
Colonel Benton and Mr. Wright in the face ; strong 
enough, not merely to divide Mr. Butler's last crust 
with him, but to snatch the whole of it ; strong enough 
to ejaculate Mr. Van Buren out of the window — 
under whom they had once triumphed — on whom 
they rallied again in six months after the defeat of 
1840, and who had been their candidate as notoriously 
and avowedly as Mr. Clay had been ours — and of 
whom no man of any party will deny, that in point 
of accomplishment aud talent and experience of pub- 
lic affairs, he is immeasurably Mr. Polk's superior; 
strongf enous^h to have dissolved that convention in a 
half an hour, had it not conceded their utmost de- 
mands — raining if they could not rule; — if Mr. 
Polk should be disposed to do nothing, do you believe 
such a party, or such a faction as this, would permit 
him to do nothing? No. No. Desperately, weakly, 
fatally, does he deceive himself who will not see, that 
every thing which an Executive, elected expressly to 
do this deed, can do, will be done, and done at once ! 
He will put it forward in his very first message. He 
will put it forward as the one, grand measure of his 
party, and of his administration. Nothing will be 
left unstirred to effect it. The farewell words of 
General Jackson will be rung in admiring and sub- 
servient ears. Ay, that drum shall be beaten, which 
might call the dead of all his battles to the " midnight 
review," in shadowy files ! The measure will not be 
attempted again, in the first instance, in the form of 
a treaty, requiring two thirds of the senate, but in the 
form of a law, requiring a majority of only one. Do 



THE ANNEXATION OF TEXAS. 389 

you say such a majority cannot be commanded ? Do 
not be too sure of that. I pray you, give no vote, with- 
hold no vote, on such a speculation as that. Do not, 
because President Tjder has not been able to com- 
mand a majority — President Tj^ler, without a party, 
with one whole division of the Democratic party, with 
Colonel Benton and Mr. Wright at its head, against 
him ; with the Southern Whigs, under the seasonable 
and important lead of Mr. Clay, against him to a man 
— do not, because under these special and temporary 
circumstances, he has not been able to obtain a ma- 
jority, therefore, lay the flattering unction to your 
soul, that when a president who has a party, and that 
party a majority of the people, flushed with a recent 
victory won on this precise issue, shall try his hand 
at the business : when Colonel Benton — the tempo- 
rary and special circumstances of his recent resistance 
having subsided — shall resume his natural and earlier 
position ; and " La Salle" and " Americanus " shall 
be himself again ; when Southern Whigs, no longer 
rallying to the lead of Mr. Clay, shall resume their 
natural position, or shall divide on the question ; when 
the whole tactics of party, tlie united or general 
strength of the South, the vast and multiform influ- 
ence of a strong Executive shall be combined ; when 
the measure comes to be pressed, under every specious 
name, by aid of every specious topic of patriotism and 
aggrandizement ; when, if any one, or two, or ten, or 
twenty members of congress should manifest symp- 
toms of recusanc}^ or should try the effect of a little 
" sweet, reluctant, amorous delay," the weird sisters 
of ambitious hearts shall play before their eyes images 
of foreign missions, and departments, and benches of 



.340 THE ANNEXATION OF TEXAS. 

justice — do not deceive yourselves into the belief 
that the majority of one will not be secured. I speak 
now of the admission of Texas as a mere territory. 
The erection of that territory into States will be a 
very different undertaking — later, less promising, a 
far more dreadful trial of the ties of the Union. Of 
that I have something to say hereafter; but I have 
no doubt whatever, and I feel it to be an urgent duty 
to declare it, that the territory, as territory^ will be 
admitted in twelve months after Mr. Polk's election, 
unless some extraordinary interposition of the people, 
on which I dare not speculate, shall prevent it. 

[Mr. Choate then proceeded to observe upon a letter, which 
he had read in the " National Intelligencer," signed by seven 
prominent members of the Democratic party in New York, in- 
cluding the accomplished editor of the " Evening Post," in which 
the writers declare their purpose of supporting Mr. Polk, but 
recommend the election of members of congress ' ' who will re- 
ject the unwarrantable scheme now pressed on the country." 
He remarked on the concessions of the letter, to wit : " that the 
Baltimore convention had placed the Democratic party at the 
North in a position of great difficulty ; " that it exposed the party 
to the constant taunt " that the convention rejected Mr. Van Buren 
and nominated Mr. Polk, for reasons connected with the immedi- 
ate annexation of Texas ; " " that it went still further and inter- 
polated into the party creed a new doctrine, hitherto unknown 
among us, — at war with some of our established principles, and 
abhorrent to the opinions and feelings of a great majority of 
Northern freemen ! " And he doubted whether a State which 
should give its vote for a president nominated solely for the very 
purpose of annexing Texas would or could, in the same breath, 
elect members of congress to go and defeat the " scheme," — 
'^unwarrantable" enough, no doubt, but yet the precise and 
single "scheme" which Mr. Polk was brought forward to ac- 
complish, — and whether they, or such as they, who sTirrendered 
to the candidate at Baltimore, would be very likely to beard and 
baffle the incumbent at Washington. He then resumed :] 



THE ANNEXATION OF TEXAS. 341 

The election of Mr. Polk, then, will, or may prob- 
ably, annex Texas as a territory. The election of Mr. 
Clay defeats or postpones it indefinitely. Some per- 
sons pretend to doubt, or at least seem to deny this. 
But do they do him, themselves, and the great sub- 
ject, justice ? Read his letter upon this subject ; 
observe the broad and permanent grounds of exclu- 
sion which he there sketches ; advert to the well- 
weighed declaration, that so long as any considerable 
opposition to the measure shall be manifested, he will 
resist it ; and you cannot fail to see that unless you 
yourselves, — unless Massachusetts and Vermont and 
Ohio, — should withdraw their opposition, for his 
term at least, 3^0 u are safe, and all are safe. That 
letter, in my judgment, makes him a title to every 
anti-Texas vote in America. The circumstances 
under which it was given to the world, I happened 
well to know. It was before eitlier convention had 
assembled at Baltimore. It was as yet, to me at least, 
uncertain what ground Mr. Van Buren would take. 
Warm friends of Mr. Clay in congress would have 
dissuaded him from immediate publication. They 
feared its effect even on the Whig convention itself; 
they feared its wider and more permanent effect. 
Wait a little, the}^ said. Feel the pulse of the dele- 
gates as they come to Washington. Attend for a few 
days the rising voice of the general press of the South. 
He rejected these counsels of indecision, and directed 
it to be given to the country. In my judgment, that 
act saved the country. It fixed and rallied the uni- 
versal Whig opinion upon this subject instantly, and 
everywhere. It suspended the warm feelings of the 
South, until its sober second thought could discern, 



342 THE ANNEXATION OF TEXAS. 

as now it has begun to discern, that fair and tempting 
as this forbidden fruit shows to the sense, it brings with 
it death, and all woe, with loss of Eden. The position 
which Mr. Clay held, — the inhabitant of a slave 
State ; his birtliplace Virginia ; the part he transacted 
in the Missouri controversy ; his known and intense 
Americanism of feeling, eager enough, eager in the 
man as in the boy, to lay hold of every occasion to 
carry up his country to the loftiest summit of a dura- 
ble and just glory, and therefore not disinclined to 
mere enlargement of territory, if the acquisition had 
been just, prudent, equitable, honorable — this felic- 
ity of position enabled him to do what few other 
men of even equal capacity and patriotism could do ; 
enabled him to quench in the spark, if now the peo- 
ple sustain him, this stupendous conception of mad- 
ness and of guilt. 

If the election of Mr. Polk, then, may annex Texas, 
and that of Mr. Clay defeat or indefinitely postpone 
it, what are the moral duties of the opponents of 
annexation, of all parties ? You are a Democrat, for 
example, and yoa would, on every other account than 
this of Texas, desire the success of the Democratic 
ticket. You are an Abolitionist, and without ex- 
pecting the success of your ticket, you would desire 
to give it the utmost practicable appearance of 
growth and strength. But can you, in sense and 
fairness, say, that all the other good which, even on 
your principles, the election of Mr. Polk, or the 
exhiljition of a growing vote for Mr. Birney, would 
accomplish, or all the other evils which either of these 
results would prevent, would compensate for the 
various and the transcendent evil of annexation? 



I 



THE ANNEXATION OF TEXAS. 343 

Can you doubt, when you calmly weigh all the other 
good which j^ou achieve by effecting your object against 
the mischief you do by annexation, — can you doubt 
that the least thing which you owe your conscience, 
your country, the utmost which pride and consistency 
have a right to exact of you, is neutrality f You will 
not say, for instance, that you believe that a mere 
postponement of Democratic ascendency for five 
years will permanently and irreparably impair the 
Constitution and the prosperity of our country, or 
bereave her of a ray of her glory ? She can endure 
so long, even you do not doubt, the evil of the politics 
which you disapprove. She can afford to wait so long, 
even you will admit, for the politics which you prefer. 
But the evil of annexation is as immediate, as irre- 
trievable, and as eternal as it is enormous ! Time, 
terms of presidential office, ages, instead of healing, 
will but display, will but exasperate, the immedicable 
wound ! Yes, yes ! He who,* some space hereafter — 
how long, how brief that space, you may not all taste 
of death until you know — he who — another Thucy- 
dides, another Sismondi — shall observe and shall 
paint a Union dissolved, the silver cord loosed, the 
golden bowl broken at the fountain ; he who shall ob- 
serve and shall paint the nation's flag folded mourn- 
fully, and laid aside in the silent chamber where the 
memorials of renown and grace, now dead, are gath- 
ered together ; who shall record the ferocious factions, 
the profligate ambition, the hot rivalry, the wars of 
hate, the truces of treachery, — which shall furnish 
the matter of the history of alienated States, till one 
after another burns out and falls from its place on 
high, — he shall entitle this stained and mournful 
chapter the Consequences of Annexation. 



344 THE ANNEXATION OF TEXAS. 

But look at this business a little more in its details. 

I will not move the question of its effect on Ameri- 
can slavery. Whether it will transplant the stricken 
race from old States to new ; whether it will concen- 
trate it on a different, larger or smaller area than it 
now covers, whether the result of this again would be 
to increase or diminish its numbers, its sufferings, and 
its chances of ultimate emancipation, — this is a specu- 
lation from which I retire. I repeat what I had the 
honor to say in the debate on the treaty, that the 
avowed and the direct object of annexation certainly is 
to prevent the abolition of slavery on a vast region 
which would else become free. The immediate effect 
intended and secured in the first instance, therefore, 
certainly is the diffusion and increase of slaver}^ So 
far we see. So much we know. More than that, no 
man can be certain that he sees or knows. Whether 
this is to work an amelioration of the status of slavery 
while it lasts, or to shorten its duration, is in His 
counsels, " who out of evil still educes good in infinite 
progression." The means we see are evil. The first 
effect is evil. The end is uncertain. But, if it were 
certain and were good, we may not do evil that good 
may come. While, therefore, I feel it to be my duty 
distinctly to say that I would leave to the masters of 
slaves every guaranty of the Constitution and the 
Union, — the Constitution as it is, the Union as it is, 
— without which there is no security for you or for 
them — no, not for a day, — I still controvert the 
power, I deny the morality, I tremble for the conse- 
quences, of annexing an acre of new territory, /or the 
mere purpose of diffusing this great evil, this great 
curse, over a wider surface of American earth. Still 



II 



THE ANNEXATION OF TEXAS. 345 

less would T, for such a purpose merely^ lay hold on 
such a territory as Texas, larger than France, and 
almost as fair; least of all now, just when the spirit 
of liberty is hovering over it, in act to descend. 

But trace the consequences of annexation on our- 
selves. First, chief, most comprehensive, and most 
irretrievable of its evils, ivill he its disastrous aspect on 
the durability of the Union. Texas, let us suppose, 
the territory, as territory, is annexed. The war with 
Mexico is at an end. The valor of the West has 
triumphed. The debt of the war, the debt of Texas 
is funded. Time passes. New states carved out of 
its ample fields knock for admission into the Union. 
Do you consider that it may cut up into forty as 
large as Massachusetts? But suppose twenty, fifteen, 
ten, five, only — apply one after another. Is there a 
man, out of a mad-house, who does not see that five, 
three, one, such application could not be acted on, and 
either rejected or granted, without shaking this gov- 
ernment to its foundation ? Is there a man who does 
not see that if all the malice and all the ingenuity of 
Hell were appealed to, to devise one fiery and final 
trial of the strength of our American feeling, of our 
fraternal love, of our appreciation of the uses of 
union, of all our bonds of political brotherhood, it 
could contrive no ordeal half so dreadful as this ? To 
me this seems so palpable, that I have doubted 
whether Colonel Benton is not right in his conjec- 
ture that disunion is the exact object aimed at by 
some of the movers of annexation. Certainly, in 
looking over that grim bead-roll of South Carolina 
toasts and dinner-speeches which covers a broadside 
of the last " Intelligencer," it is quite impossible to 



346 THE ANNEXATION OF TEXAS. 

resist the conclusion that, as regards some individuals 
of this body of annexationists, either they are labor- 
ing under very treasonable politics, or that their 
Madeira has quite too much brandy in it. I will say, 
too, of any annexationist, who thinks that because we 
survived the Missouri question, it would be a pretty 
thing to move a half-dozen more such questions, that 
he means to sever the States, or is profoundly igno- 
rant of the Avay by which they are to be kept to- 
gether. Does he consider under what totally different 
circumstances these new Missouri questions would 
break out, from those which attended the old ? Does 
he consider that the territory of Missouri was already 
parcel of the United States, and had been so for near 
twenty years ; that, unlike Texas, it had been annexed 
as part of Louisiana, with no view at all to the diffu- 
sion and perpetuation of slavery, but on grounds of 
policy which the severest moralist, the strictest ex- 
pounder of the Constitution, the most passionate 
lover of libert}^ might approve ; and, therefore, that 
having been received as a territory diver so iyituitu^ the 
public sensibility was less shocked by its emergence 
into a slave State than now it would be, when the 
end and aim of the original acquisition is slavery, 
wholly slavery, and nothing but slavery ? Does he 
reflect how vast a change the sentiments of civiliza- 
tion have undergone on that whole subject since 
eighteen hundred and twenty ? Does he remember 
that in that learning the world is five hundred years 
older than it was then ? Can he not read the gather- 
ing signs of the times ? Does he not mark the blazing 
characters traced by the bodiless hand, as in the 
unfinished picture ? Does he not remember what the 



THE ANNEXATION OF TEXAS. 347 

nations have done, and especially what England has 
done, within twenty years ? Does he not see and 
feel that in that interval a public opinion has been 
generated, has been organized, wholly new, aggres- 
sive, intolerant of the sight, intolerant of the cry, of 
man in chains ? Does he not see and feel with what 
electrical force and speed it strikes from one quarter 
of the globe to another, and is spreading to enfold 
the whole civilized world like an atmosphere ? Does 
he think it wise to blow such an atmosphere into a 
hurricane of flame? Does he reall}^ expect to bring 
his five States into the Union? Is he not sure of fail- 
ing, and is he not seeking a pretext for fij^ing in a pas- 
sion ; for complaining tliat teriitory constitutionally 
entitled to admission is excluded, and thereupon for 
retiring from the Union, if he can, himself? How- 
ever this may be, I say that he means to sever the 
States, or he is profoundly ignorant, or criminally 
reckless, of the temper and policy by which they are 
to be holden together. 

I would have him, who desires adequately to com- 
prehend the probable influence of annexation on the 
durability of the Union, and its influence on the tem- 
per and feelings of the States composing the Union, 
one towards another, to consider also, whether, over 
and above these eternal antipathies of liberty and 
slavery, which it must kindle into inextinguishable 
flame — whether over and above these, this measure 
will not appear, and ought not to appear, to be a 
mere attempt to retain, or to give, to one region and 
one interest of the republic, an ascendency, to which, 
as against the others, it is not entitled ? Is there not 
vast danger that in this way it will array States, and 



348 THE ANNEXATION OF TEXAS. 

regions of States, against each other, on a contest of 
interest, of business, of relative local power ? Will § 
it not be regarded as affrontive to the pride, as a 
usurpation on the constitutional rights, as menacing 
to the pockets, of portions of the people of America, 
as well as an outrage on the sentiment of liberty and 
the spirit of the age ? How can it be defended, on 
the principles of our political association ? The gen- 
eration of our fathers, who framed the Union, saw as 
well as we do the great natural regional divisions of 
the country. They foresaw, as well as we now see, 
that one of these regions might come to prefer one 
system of industrial governmental policy, and another 
to prefer another ; that one might incline to free 
trade, and another to protection ; that one might a 
little more solicitously favor the interests of cotton - 
planting ; another, those of navigation ; another, those 
of general agriculture ; another, those of the mechani- 
cal and manufacturing arts. They foresaw that in 
this way there might grow to be such a thing as a 
Southern, or a Western, or a Central, or an Eastern 
administration, — each of which should be a constitu- 
tional administration, — and yet the policy of each 
might take a tincture from the locality which pre- 
dominated in its origin and composition. They fore- 
saw, too, that there would come to be what you would 
call Southern influence and Western influence and 
Central influence and Eastern influence ; that these 
would strive together, without rest, for amicable mas- 
tery ; and they fondly dreamed, or rationally hoped, 
that out of this opposition and counteraction, ''this 
reciprocal struggle of discordant powers," might flow 
a harmony that should never end. They foresaw, too, 



THE ANNEXATION OF TEXAS. 349 

that in the progress of time the operation of natural 
causes might change, and change often, all those 
relations which marked the era of 1789. The vouno- 
cotton-plant of the South, scarcely known to art or 
commerce then, might place or might keep the fair 
and fertile region that alone produced it, for ages, at 
the head of the confederacy. The exhaustless soil 
and temperate climate of the West might attract ayd 
seat the centre of power there, — on the impurpled 
prairie, — by the shores of inland oceans. Labor and 
liberty and culture might sometimes win it back to 
the rock of Plymouth, to the battle-fields of Bunker 
Hill and Bennington, to the summits of our granite 
mountains, to the side of our bridal sea. Of all these 
alternations, they intended that the people of America, 
the people of each region of America, should take the 
risk. Of all these, we are ready to take the risk. 
Of all these, we always have run the risk. But there 
is one thing, of which the framers of the Constitution 
never meant that we or any region should take the 
risk ; and that is, that an}^ region, any interest, should 
call in foreign allies to prolong and augment an ascen- 
dency^ which, under the action of natural causes, might 
he imagined to he passing atvay ! They never meant 
that the North should call in the Canadas, or New- 
foundland, or Greenland, for the sole purpose of giv- 
ing us more votes in congress for lumber duties, or 
potash duties, or peltry duties, or fishing bounties, or 
the protection of wool. They never meant that the 
South should bring in Mexico, or Cuba, for the sole 
purpose of voting down the tariff, or maintaining any 
dominion or any institution, merely because the broad, 
deep, and resistless stream of time was threatening to 



350 THE ANNEXATION OF TEXAS. 

bear it silently away. No ! No ! That is not the 
Union we came into. That is not the race we set out 
to run. We agreed to love, honor, and cherish, a 
certain national identity. We agreed to place our- 
selves in the power of a certain national identity. 
We agreed to take our chance of any constitutional 
administration of government ; any fashion of poli- 
tics ; any predominance of interests, opinions, and 
institutions, to which that might constitutionally sub- 
ject us. But we did not agree to love — we did not 
agree to be governed by — all creation! We did 
not agree that the merchants of Matanzas, the gold 
miners of Mexico, the logwood cutters of Honduras, 
the Indian traders of Santa Fe, Coahuila, or Chihua- 
hua, whose " barbarous appellations " we can neither 
pronounce nor spell, should make our laws. Non Jicec 
in fcedera veni! Take care lest the people of all 
regions, but one, should give the translation, — " W© 
made no such bargain, and we stand no such non- 
sense." 

With these impressions of the evils of annexation, 
it is difficult to suppress a sentiment of indignation at 
what would otherwise deserve nothing but ridicule, 
— the reasons Avhich men give for this measure, who 
are ashamed or afraid to give the true one. " Texas 
is so fair and fertile," they say ; as if this were not 
just as good an argument for annexing France, — 
a better one, since France, though not so large, is 
fairer and more fertile. " It will increase our ex- 
portations of cotton and sugar so much," — as if we 
should not grasp Egypt and Brazil and Hindostan 
on that reason; as if Colonel Holmes's letter, just 
published, did not tell us that the consumption of 



I 



THE ANNEXATION OF TEXAS. 351 

cotton is already stationary in England and France, 
and that the thing aimed at by South Carolina is not 
to increase the supply against that demand, but to 
increase the demand, by increasing English ability to 
consume ; and to do that hy giving to the English 
manvfacturers the market of Amei^ica. " The waters 
of Texas flow into our Mississippi, and therefore it 
would be impious not to reunite what nature had 
joined." Impious! — as if there would not be ex- 
actly the same clamor for it, if its waters flowed into 
I know not what lake, of fire or of death ! " It will 
consume such unknown quantities of northern manu- 
factures." Unknown, indeed! as if we were quite 
so verdant as not to be perfectly aware that the 
precise object of some of the more prominent movers 
of this business is to get Texan votes to stop your 
mills, not Texan customers to buy your cloth ; that 
some of those men would be glad to-day to see you 
send your children or your horses to England to be 
shod ; that what they notoriously aim at, is not at all 
an increased ability to consume your inanufactwes, 
but an increased vote against your tariff, and an 
easier victory over your labor. " Texas will admit 
British goods, duty free, or under low duties, and 
they will be smuggled in such quantities into the 
United States as to diminish our revenue, and evade 
our law of protection ! " — a reason which I am sorry 
to see receive the sanction of a convention of Massa- 
chusetts men, of whatever politics, — scarcely satis- 
factory, I venture to conjecture, to any manly-minded 
and intelligent member of that body of our Demo- 
cratic fellow-citizens, who have just made their nomi- 
nation of o'overnor ; as if Texas, starved to death, 



152 THE ANNEXATION OF TEXAS. 

crushed, paralyzed, for want of money — Texas, al- 
most compelled to let go the sweet and proud boon 
of national independence, because she has not the 
financial ability to assert her title to it — as if she 
can afford to admit English goods free of duty, or 
under duties so far below our own as to warrant 
such an absurd apprehension ; as if all Louisiana 
and Arkansas and Missouri were going to form a 
great copartnership of smuggling with Yorkshire and 
Liverpool ; as if, on this hypothesis, you must not 
have jNIexico too, for she is under English influence, 
and will lend a hand to this hopeful scheme of turn- 
ing the flank of the tariff; and Canada, — which is 
England herself, — in direct contact with more States 
than Texas touches ; — nay, as if you must not, as a 
good Alabama Whig said, make up 3^our minds to 
have " no outside row at all, for the squirrels to 
eat ; " and so strike dead to the water all round, at 
once, not forgetting your right to a marine league, 
of say a couple of thousand miles long, to prevent 
hovering on your coasts. 

No, Fellow-citizens, there is no case made for an- 
nexation at all. Let him who is making his mind up 
on that subject, and who desires to do so, not in the 
small spirit of a narrow and local selfishness, but as 
a patriot, a Unionist, a statesman, a Christian, a lover 
of his kind ; let him unroll the map of our territor}^ 
as now we hold it, broad, boundless as an ocean ; let 
him, on that map, observe how that territory spreads 
itself out from the St. John to the Sabine, eight and 
twenty hundred miles of coast, and inland to the 
Rocky Mountains, ay, to the great tranquil sea, 
more than thirty-five hundred miles — wider than 



THE ANNEXATION OF TEXAS. 353 

the vast Atlantic, let him mark how it extends 
through twenty parallels of latitude and thirty of 
longitude, through all climates and all soils ; let him 
observe, as he descends from North to South, how it 
successivel}^ displays a sample and a rival of all the 
great productions and all the great productive re- 
gions of the globe, — pine forests, like those of 
Norwa}^; wheat- fields outmeasuring those of Poland; 
pastures ampler and fairer than the shepherds of 
England and Spain ever saw ; cotton, rice, for the 
world, though Egypt and India were smitten with 
instant and perpetual sterility ; let him reflect that 
there are limits of a nation's territorial extent, which 
the laws of nature and of man do not permit them 
to transcend, beyond which the warm tides of the 
national heart cannot be propelled, or cannot flow 
back, — beyond which unity, identity, nationality, 
are dissolved and dissipated ; and then let him bear 
in mind that our territory is already three times 
larger than England, Spain, France, and Italy, all 
put together, — larger than the Roman Empire in its 
zenith ; and he will be prepared to say whether, with 
or without the cost of a war; with or without the 
violation of treaties; with or without the approval of 
the moral judgments of the world ; irrespective of all 
influence upon his own State, or region of States, he 
thinks it well to add to this vast region another, 
forty times larger than Massachusetts, — larger than 
France, for the purpose of perpetuating slavery, on 
a soil certain otherwise, and speedily, to be free. 
How far wiser, more innocent, more glorious, to 
improve what we have; to fell our forests; to con- 
struct our railroads ; to reclaim our earth ; to fit it 

23 



354 THE ANNEXATION OF TEXAS. 

all Tip to be the spacious and beautiful abode of one 
harmonious family of Man ! 

And, now, Fellow-citizens, if these are the evils of 
annexation ; and if the election of Mr. Polk will, or 
probably may, effect annexation, and that of Mr. 
Clay will defeat, or postpone it indefinitel}^ — what, 
I ask, once more, are the duties of the opponents of 
this measure, of, all parties? What are your moral 
duties? If the mischiefs of Mr. Polk's administra- 
tion would agree to take any shape but this ; if they 
were certain not to go beyond four years of disordered 
cnrrency ; interrupted improvements ; indiscreet dis- 
position of the lands ; unstable and insufficient pro- 
tection of labor — if this were all, — I would not ask 
a man — I would not thank a man to change or to 
withhold a vote. I know there are Whigs enough, 
Whigs from their mothers' arms — now and always 
such, who, without the stimulus of uncompromising 
hostility to Texas, — without that, — on a calm, 
habitual estimate of the general politics involved, 
— could turn Mr. Polk back again upon the conven- 
tion that discovered him, and win anew the victory 
of 1840. But I acknowledge an earnest desire to see 
*' this unwarrantable scheme " — as the New York 
Democrats have pronounced it — encountered by an 
opposition approaching to unanimity. I should like 
to see it shamed out of sight, for at least our day. 
Why, the wisdom and patriotism of the better South 
disoAvns it ! See how the old glorious North Caro- 
lina has gone into action, and how she has come out 
of it ! Hark to the thunder that announces the risen 
and triumj^hant Kentucky ! Is this a day for New 
England to be inactive, or to be distracted ? Do you 



THE ANNEXATION OF TEXAS. 355 

need to be told, what I love not to dwell or touch 
upon, that if the designs of some of those who would 
annex Texas could be accomplished ; if they could 
succeed in turning Texas to the account which 
they dream of ; if, by that aid, they could subvert 
your industrial policy ; could retransfer your work- 
shops to Europe ; could prevent the industry of 
America from doing the work of America ; could 
suspend these diversified employments, which de- 
velop, discijDline, occup}^ and reward the universal 
faculties of this community ; which give to every 
taste and talent the task best suited to it ; which 
give occupation to the strong and weak ; the bright 
and the dull ; to both sexes and to all ages, and at 
all times, — in winter and summer; in wet weather 
and in dry weather ; by dajdight and lamplight ; to 
all and each, — "a fair clay's wages for a fair day's 
work ; " — if they could strike down the giant arm of 
Labor helpless to his side — if the politics which you 
are this day in the field to resist could triumph, — do 
you not know — that even if the Union were pre- 
served, New England would be cast into provincial, 
into parochial insignificance? ay, that this New 
'Eno'land, the New Ensjland that we love : the New 
England of our fathers and of history — that the 
places which once knew this New England would 
know her no more ? Having a form to live, she 
would be dead. Having a form of constitutional 
life, the strong, soaring, and beautiful spirit would 
have departed. If the Union were preserved; if the 
great constellation still held on its journey in the 
sky, these once jubilant stars of the morning would 
be silent and dim. 



356 THE ANNEXATION OF TEXAS. 

But I would rather show yoa a loftier motive than 
any impulse of local interest, or local affection, or 
local pride. 1 tell you, Fellow-citizens of all parties, 
here and everywhere, that if you love the Union 
as once you did, out of a pure heart, fervently ; if 
neither the small gasconades of nullifiers, nor the 
gloomy ravings of fanatics have chilled that sweet, 
cherished, and hereditary sentiment ; if jou. yet love 
to turn awa}^ from the croaker who predicts, the 
hypocrite who desires, the bully who threatens, the 
arithmetician who computes, the traitor who plots, 
dissolution of the Union ; if you love, turning from 
these, to go and erect and refresh your sj^irits by 
pondering the farewell counsels of Washington, by 
drawing from that capacious national heart, by re- 
tracing that illustrious life, — if you, whoever you 
are, wherever you are, whatever you are, are for the 
Union against everybody, for the Union with any- 
body, for the Union first, last, and always, — then 
stand by us, and we will stand b}^ you — this once ! 
This once ! Another time, on other subjects, we can 
quarrel, but not now — not now, when the legions 
throng up to the very walls of the city of David, and 
the engines thunder at its gate. Another time we 
can sleep on and take our rest, but not now : 

Awake, arise, or be for ever fallen I 



ON THE JUDICIAL TENURE. 357 



SPEECH ON THE JUDICIAL TENURE. 



DELIVERED IN THE MASSACHUSETTS STATE CONVENTION, 

JULY 14, 1853. 



It is not my purpose to enter at large on the discus- 
sion of this important subject. That discussion is 
exhausted ; and if it is not, your patience is ; and if 
not quite so, you have arrived, I apprehend, each to 
his own conclusion. But as I had the honor to serve 
on the committee to whom the department of the 
judiciary was referred, I desire to be indulged in the 
statement of my opinions, abstaining from any at- 
tempt elaborately to enforce them. 

I feel no apprehension that this body is about to 
recommend an election of judges by the people. All 
appearances ; the votes taken ; the views disclosed in 
debate ; the demonstrations of important men here, 
indicate the contrary. I do not mean to say that 
such a proposition has not been strenuously pressed, 
and in good faith ; yet, for reasons which I will not 
consume my prescribed hour in detailing, there is no 
danger of it. Whether members are ready for such 
a thing or not, they avow, themselves, that they do 
not think the people are ready. 

What I most fear is, that the deliberation may end 
in limiting the tenure of judicial office to a term of 
years, seven or ten; that in the result we shall hear 



358 ON THE JUDICIAL TENURE. 

it urged, " as we are good enough not to stand out 
for an election by the people, you ought to be ca- 
pable of an equal magnanimity, and not stand out 
for the present term of good behavior ; " and thus 
we shall be forced into a compromise in favor of 
periodical and frequent appointment, — which shall 
please everybody a little. 

I have the honor to submit to the convention 
that neither change is needed. Both of them, if 
experience may in the least degree be relied on, are 
fraught with evils unnumbered. To hazard either, 
would be, not to realize the boast that we found the 
capitol, in this behalf, brick, and left it marble ; but 
contrariwise, to change its marble to brick. 

Sir, in this inquiry what mode of judicial appoint- 
ment, and Avhat tenure of judicial office, you will 
recommend to the people, I think that there is but 
one safe or sensible mode of proceeding, and that is 
to ascertain wiiat mode of appointment, and what 
length and condition of tenure, will be most certain, 
in the long run, guiding ourselves by the lights of all 
the experience and all the observation to which we 
can resort, to bring and keep the best judge upon 
the bench — the best judge for the ends of his great 
office. There is no other test. That an election by 
the people, once a year, or an appointment by the 
governor once a year, or once in five, or seven, or ten 
years, will operate to give to an ambitious young 
lawyer (I refer to no one in this body) a better 
chance to be made a judge — as the wheel turns 
round — is no recommendation, and is nothing to the 
purpose. That this consideration has changed, or 
framed, the constitutions of some of the States whose 



ON THE JUDICIAL TENURE. 359 

example has been pressed on us, I have no doubt. 
Let it have no weight here. We, at least, hold 
that offices, and most of all the judicial office, are 
not made for incumbents or candidates, but for the 
people ; to establish justice ; to guarantee security 
among them. Let us constitute the office in refer- 
ence to its ends. 

I go for that system, if I can find it or help find 
it, which gives me the highest degree of assurance, 
taking man as he is, at his strongest and at his 
weakest, and in the average of the lot of humanity, 
that there shall be the best judge on every bench 
of justice in the commonwealth, through its succes- 
sive generations. That we may safely adopt such 
a system ; that is to say, that we may do so and 
yet not abridge or impair or endanger our popular 
polity in the least particular ; that we may secure the 
best possible judge, and yet retain, ay, help to per- 
petuate and keep in health, the utmost affluence of 
liberty with which civil life can be maintained, I will 
attempt to show hereafter. For the present, I ask, 
how shall we get and keep the best judge for the 
work of the judge? 

Well, Sir, before I can go to that inquiry, I must 
pause at the outset, and, inverting a little what has 
been the order of investigation here, ask first, who 
and what is such a judge ; who is that best judge ? 
what is he? how shall we know him? On this 
point it is impossible that there should be the 
slightest difference of opinion among us. On some 
things we differ. Some of you are dissatisfied with 
this decision or with that. Some of you take ex- 
ception to this judge or to that. Some of you, 



360 ON THE JUDICIAL TENURE. 

more loftily, hold that one way of appointing to 
the office, or one wa}^ of limiting the tenure, is a 
little more or less monarchical, or a little more or 
less democratic than another — and so we differ ; but 
I do not believe there is a sing^le member of the con- 
vention who will not agree with me in the description 
I am about to give of the good judge ; who will not 
agree with me that the system which is surest to put 
and to keep him on the bench is the true system for 
Massachusetts. 

In the first place, he should be profoundly learned 
in all the learning of the law, and he must know how 
to use that learning. Will any one stand up here to 
deny this? In this day, boastful, glorious for its 
advancing popular, professional, scientific, and all 
education, will any one disgrace himself by doubting 
the necessity of deep and continued studies, and 
various and thorough attainments, to the bench? 
He is to know, not merely the law which you make, 
and the legislature makes, not constitutional and 
statute law alone, but that other ampler, that bound- 
less jurisprudence, the common law, which the suc- 
cessive generations of the State have silently built 
up ; that old code of freedom which we brought with 
us in The Mayflower and Arbella, but which in the 
progress of centuries we have ameliorated and en- 
riched, and adapted wisely to the necessities of a 
busy, prosperous, and wealthy community, — that he 
must know. And where to find it? In volumes 
which you must count by hundreds, by thousands; 
filling libraries ; exacting long labors, — the labors of 
a lifetime, abstracted from business, from politics ; 
but assisted by taking part in an active judicial ad- 



ON THE JUDICIAL TENURE. 361 

ministration ; such labors as produced the wisdom 
and won the fame of Parsons and Marshall, and 
Kent and Story, and Holt and Mansfield. If your 
system of appointment and tenure does not present 
a motive, a help for such labors and such learning ; 
if it discourages, if it disparages them, in so far it is 
a failure. 

In the next place, he must be a man, not merely up- 
right, not merely honest and well-intentioned, — this 
of course, — but a man who will not respect persons 
in judgment. And does not every one here agree ta 
this also? Dismissing, for a moment, all theories 
about the mode of appointing him, or the time for 
which he shall hold office, sure I am, we all demand, 
that as far as human virtue, assisted by the best con- 
trivances of human wisdom, can attain to it, he shall 
not respect persons in judgment. He shall know no- 
thing about the parties, every thing about the case. 
He shall do every thing for justice ; nothing for him- 
self ; nothing for his friend ; nothing for his patron ; 
nothing for his sovereign. If on one side is the 
executive power and the legislature and the people, 
— the sources of his honors, the givers of his daily 
bread, and on the other an individual nameless and 
odious, his eye is to see neither, great nor small ; 
attending only to the '' trepidations of the balance." 
If a law is passed by a unanimous legislature, clam- 
ored for by the general voice of the public, and a 
cause is before him on it, in which the whole com- 
munity is on one side and an individual nameless or 
odious on the other, and he believes it to be against 
the Constitution, he must so declare it, — or there is 
no judge. If Athens comes there to demand that 



362 ON THE JUDICIAL TENURE. 

the cup of hemlock be put to the lips of the wisest 
of men ; and he believes that he has not cornipted 
the youth, nor omitted to worship the gods of the city, 
nor introduced new divinities of his own, he must 
deliver him, although the thunder light on the un- 
terriiied brow. 

This, Sir, expresses, by very general illustration, 
what I mean when I say I would have him no re- 
specter of persons in judgment. How we are to find, 
and to keep such an one ; by what motives ; by what 
helps ; whether by popular and frequent election, or 
by executive designation, and permanence dependent 
on good conduct in office alone — we are hereafter 
to inquire ; but that we must have him, — that his 
price is above rubies, — that he is necessary, if 
justice, if security, if right are necessary for man, — 
all of you, from the East or West, are, I am sure, 
unanimous. 

And, finally, he must possess the perfect confidence 
of the community, that he bear not the sword in vain. 
To be honest, to be no respecter of persons, is not 
yet enough. He must be believed such. I should 
be glad so far to indulge an old-fashioned and cher- 
ished professional sentiment as to say, that I would 
have something of venerable and illustrious attach 
to his character and function, in the judgment and 
feelings of the commonwealth. But if this should 
be thought a little above, or behind the time, I do 
not fear that I subject myself to the ridicule of any 
one, when I claim that he be a man towards whom 
the love and trust and affectionate admiration of the 
people should flow ; not a man perching for a winter 
and summer in our court-houses, and then gone for- 



ON THE JUDICIAL TENURE. 363 

ever, but one to whose benevolent face, and bland 
and diofnified manners, and firm administration of the 
whole learning of the law, we become accustomed ; 
whom our eyes anxiously, not in vain, explore when 
we enter the temple of justice ; towards whom our 
attachment and trust grow even with the growth of 
his own eminent reputation. I would have him one 
who might look back from the venerable last years of 
Mansfield, or Marshall, and recall such testimonies as 
these to the great and good Judge : — 

" The 3'oung men saw me, and hid themselves ; and 
the aged arose and stood up. 

" The princes refrained talking, and laid their hand 
upon their mouth. 

" When the ear heard me, then it blessed me, and 
when the eye saw me, it gave witness to me. 

'' Because I delivered the j)oor that cried, and the 
fatlierless, and him that had none to help him. 

" The blessing of him that was ready to perish 
came upon me, and I caused the widow's heart to 
sing for joy. 

"I put on righteousness and it clothed me. My 
judgment was as a robe and a diadem. I was eyes 
to the blind, and feet was I to the lame. 

" I was a father to the poor, and the cause which I 
knew not, I searched out. 

" And I brake the jaws of the wicked, and plucked 
the spoil out of his teeth." 

Give to the community such a judge, and I care 
little who makes the rest of the constitution, or what 
party administers it. It will be a free government, I 
know. Let us repose, secure, un^er the shade of a 
learned, impartial, and trusted magistracy, and we 
need no more. 



864 ON THE JUDICIAL TENURE. 

And, now, what system of promotion to office and 
what tenure of office is surest to produce such a 
judge? Is it executive appointment during good 
behavior, with liabilit}', however, to be impeached 
for good cause, and to be removed by address of the 
legislature ? or is it election by the people, or ap- 
pointment by the executive for a limited term of 
years ? 

To every system there are objections. To every 
system there are sound, or there are specious ob- 
jections ; objections of theory ; objections of fact. 
Any man's ability is equal to finding, and exag- 
gerating them. What is demanded of us is to com- 
pare the good and evil of the different systems, and 
select the best. Compare them by the test which I 
have proposed. See which will most certainly give 
you the judge you need, and adopt that. It may be 
cavilled at ; even as freedom, as religion, as whole- 
some restraint, as liberty of speech, as the institution 
and the rights of proj^erty, may be cavilled at ; but 
in its fruits, in its product, judged by a long suc- 
cession of seasons, is its justification and its glory. 

Applying then. Sir, this test, I think the existing 
system is, out of all comparison, the best one. At 
the hazard of repeating and weakening the views 
presented yesterday in the impressive and admirable 
address of my friend for Manchester, [Mr. Dana,] 
and in the instructive and able arguments of the two 
gentlemen, [Mr. Greenleaf and Mr. Parker,] whose 
established professional reputations give to them 
such just weight with you, I beg to submit, briefly, 
why I think so. 

In the first place, then, it seems to me most clear 



ON THE JUDICIAL TENURE. 365 

that the weight of sound general opinion and of the 
evidence of a trustworthy experience vastly prepon- 
derates in favor of it. How the system of popular 
elections, or of short terms, is actually working now 
in any one of the States which have recently intro- 
duced it ; how, still more, it is likely to work there 
after the influences of the earlier system, the judges 
which it bred, the habits wliich it formed, the bars 
which it trained, have passed away, there is no 
proof before this Convention deserving one moment's 
notice. We do not know what is the predominant 
conviction on this subject, to-day, of those fittest to 
judge, in anyone State. We do know that they can- 
not yet possibly pronounce on the matter, however 
close or sagacious their observation. What they 
have not yet seen, they cannot yet tell. Certainly 
the result of all that I have been able to gather is a 
general and strong opinion against the new sj'stem ; 
and in favor of a return, if to return were possible, 
to that which we are yet proud and privileged to 
call our own. But the evidence is too loose for the 
slightest consideration. My friend for JManchester 
read letters yesterday from persons of high character, 
as he assured us, in New York, deploring the working 
of her new system ; and I have no doubt that the 
witnesses are respectable, and the opinions perfectly 
sound. But other gentlemen guess that very differ- 
ent letters might be obtained, by applying to the right 
quarters ; and the gentleman from New Bedford, 
[Mr. French,] is quite confident that the people of 
that great State — the two or three millions — are in 
favor of the change, because one, if not two, or even 
three individuals have personally told him so. And, 



866 ON THE JUDICIAL TENURE. 

therefore, I say, we have not here now so much 
evidence of the practical working of their recent 
systems anywhere, even as far as it has gone, that 
any honest Lawyer would advise his client to risk a 
hundred dollars on it. 

But, on the other hand, are there not most weighty 
opinions ; is there not the testimony of the widest, 
and longest, and most satisfactory experience, that 
executive appointment for good behavior yields the 
best judge? 

What is British opinion and British experience to 
the point? On the question what tenure of office 
promises the best- judge, that opinion and that experi- 
ence may well be adverted to. Whether a particular 
mode, or a particular tenure, is consonant to the re- 
publican polity of government, we must settle for 
ourselves. That is another question. Monarchical 
and aristocralical principles we will not go for to Eng- 
land or elsewhere, nor buy even learning, impartiality, 
and titles to trust, at the cost of an anti-republican 
system. But to know how it practically operates to 
have the judge dependent on the power that ap- 
points him ; dependent for his continuance in office ; 
dependent for his restoration to it ; dependent on 
any thing or on anybody but his own official good 
behavior, and that general responsibility to the legis- 
lature and public opinion, " that spirit of observation 
and censure which modifies and controls the whole 
government," — we may very well consult British or 
any other experience. The establishment of the ten- 
ure of good behavior was a triumph of liberty. It 
was a triumph of popular libert}^ against the crown. 
Before the revolution of 1688, or certainly during the 



I 



ON THE JUDICIAL TENURE. 367 

worst years of the Stuart dynasty, the judge held ofSce 
at the pleasure of the king who appointed him. What 
was the consequence? He was the tool of the hand 
that made and unmade him. Scroggs and Jeffreys 
were but representatives and exemplifications of a sys- 
tem. A whole bench sometimes was packed for the 
enforcement of some new and more flagrant royal 
usurpation. Outraged and in mourning by judicial 
subserviency and judicial murder, England discerned 
at the revolution that her liberty was incompletely 
recovered and imperfectly guarded, unless she had 
judges by whom the boast that an Englishman's 
house is his castle should be elevated from a phrase 
to a fact ; from an abstract right to a secure enjoy- 
ment, so that, although that house were " a cottage 
with a thatched roof which all the winds might enter, 
the king could not." To that end the Act of Settle- 
ment made the tenure of good behavior a part of the 
British Constitution ; and a later amendment kept the 
judicial commission alive, as my friend from Manches- 
ter yesterday reminded us, notwithstanding the de- 
mise of the sovereign, and perfected the system. Sir, 
the origin of the tenure of good behavior — marking 
thus an epoch in the progress of liberty ; a victor}^, so 
to say, of individuality, of private right, of the house- 
hold hearth of the cottager, of the " swink'd hedger," 
over the crown, — and still more, its practical work- 
ings in the judicial character and function, may well 
entitle it to thoughtful treatment. Compare the 
series of British judges since 1688 with that before, 
and draw your own conclusions. Not that all this 
improvement, in impartiality, in character, in titles to 
confidence and affection is due to the change of ten- 



368 ON THE JUDICIAL TENURE. 

ure ; but the soundest historians of that Constitution 
recognize that that is one element of transcendent 
importance. With its introduction she began to have 
a government of laws and not of men. 

I come to other testimony, other opinions — the 
lights of a different experience. There is a certain 
transaction and document called the Federal Consti- 
tution. Consult that. In 1787, that Convention, — 
assisted by the thoughts and discussions of the five 
years of peace preceding it, upon the subject of na- 
tional government, — to be constructed on the repub- 
lican form of polity — into which were gathered all, 
or almost all, of our great men, in our age of great- 
ness ; men of deep studies, ripe wisdom, illustrious 
reputation, a high spirit of liberty ; that Convention, 
upon a careful survey of the institutions of the States 
of America, and of those of other countries, and 
times past and present; upon, I think we cannot 
doubt, a profound aj^preciation of the true functions 
of a judicial department ; of the qualities of a good 
judge ; of the best system of appointment and tenure 
to obtain them — of the true nature of republican 
government — and how far, consistently with all its 
characteristic principles and aims, the people may 
well determine to appoint to office indirectly, rather 
than directly, and for good behavior, rather than for 
a limited term, when the great ends of the stability 
of justice, and the security of private right pre- 
scribe it — incorporated into the great organic law of 
the Union the principle that judges shall be appointed 
by the executive power, to hold their office during 
good behavior. 

The gentleman from Lowell [Mr. Butler] last 



ON THE JUDICIAL TENURE. 869 

evening observed, referring, I believe, to the time 
when our Constitution was adopted, that it was long 
before the age of the steamboat and railroad and mag- 
netic telegraph. It is true ; but do we know better 
than they knew the nature of man ; the nature of 
the judicial man ; what he ought to be to discliarge 
his specific functions aright ; how motives, motives of 
ambition, of fear, of true fame, of high principle, 
affect him ; whether dependence on another power is 
favorable to independence of the wishes and the will 
of that other power ? Do we know more of republi- 
can government and true liberty, and the reconcilia- 
tions of personal security under due course of law 
with the loftiest spirit of freedom, than they? Has 
the advancement of this kind of knowledge quite kept 
pace with that of the science of the material world ? 

I wish. Sir, the time of the Convention would allow 
me to read entire that paper of " The Federalist," the 
seventy-eighth I believe, in which the principle of the 
independence of the judiciary is vindicated, and execu- 
tive appointment, during good behavior, as the means 
of attaining such independence, is vindicated also. 
But read it for yourselves. Hear Hamilton and 
Madison and Jay ; for we know from all sources that 
on this subject that paper expressed the opinions of 
all, — on the independence of the judiciary, and the 
means of securing it, — a vast subject adequately 
illustrated by the highest human intelligence and 
learning and purity of principle and of public life. 

Sir, it is quite a striking reminiscence, that this very 
paper of " The Federalist," which thus maintains the 
independence of the judiciary, is among the earliest, 
perhaps the earliest, enunciation and vindication, in 

24 



370 ON THE JUDICIAL TENURE. 

this country, of that great truth, that in the American 
politics, the written Constitution — which is the 
record of the popular will — is above the law which 
is the will of the legislature merely ; that if the two 
are in conflict, the law must yield and the Constitu- 
tion must rule ; and that to determine whether such 
a conflict exists, and if so, to pronounce the law in- 
valid, is, from the nature of the judicial office, the 
plain duty of the judge. In that paper this funda- 
mental proposition of our S3^stem was first presented, 
or first elaborately presented, to the American mind ; 
its solidity and its value were established by unanswer- 
able reasoning ; and the conclusion that a bench, 
which was charged with a trust so vast and so deli- 
cate, should be as independent as the lot of humanity 
would admit — of the legislature, of the executive, of 
the temporary popular majority, whose will it might 
be required thus to subject to the higher will of the 
Constitution, was deduced by a moral demonstration. 
Beware, Sir, lest truths so indissolubly connected — 
presented together, at first ; — adojDted together — 
should die together. Consider whether, when the 
judge ceases to be independent, the Constitution 
will not cease to be supreme. If the Constitution 
does not maintain the judge against the legislature, 
and the executive, will the judge maintain the Con- 
stitution against the legislature and the executive ? 

What the working of this principle in the national 
government has been, practically, there is no need to 
remind you. Recall the series of names, the dead 
and living, who have illustrated that Bench ; advert 
to the prolonged terms of service of which the coun- 
try has had the enjoyment ; trace the growth of the 



ON THE JUDICIAL TENURE. 371 

national jurisprudence ; compare it with any other 
production of American mind or liberty ; then trace 
the progress and tendencies of political opinions, and 
say if it has not given us stability and security, and 
yet left our liberties unabridged. 

I find a third argument for the principle of execu- 
tive appointment during good behavior in this : that 
it is the existing system of Massachusetts, and it has 
operated with admirable success. It is not that it 
exists; it is that it works well. Does it not? Sir, 
is it for me, or any man, any member of the profes- 
sion of the law most of all, to rise here, and now, 
and because our feelings may have sometimes been 
ruffled or wounded b}^ a passage with the Bench: be- 
cause we have been dissatisfied by a ruling or a ver- 
dict ; because our own over-wrought brain may have 
caused us, in some moment, to become forgetful of 
ourselves ; or because a judge may have misunder- 
stood us, and done us an unintentional injury — is it 
for us to disclaim the praise, so grateful, so just, 
which the two eminent gentlemen, one of them 
formerly of New Hampshire [Mr. Parker], one of 
them formerly of Maine [Mr. Greenleaf], speaking 
without the partiality of native sons, and from obser- 
vations made by them from a point of view outside 
of us, and distant from us — have bestowed on our 
Bench and our law? Theirs are lips from which 
even flattery were sweet ; but when they concur in 
reminding you with what respect the decisions of 
this court are consulted by other courts of learn- 
ing and character ; how far their reputation has ex- 
tended ; how familiar is the profession of law with 
the great names of our judicial history ; how impor- 



372 ON THE JUDICIAL TENURE. 

tant a contribution to American jurisprudence, and 
even to the general products of American thouglit, 
our local code composes — do we not believe that 
they utter their personal convictions, and that the 
high compliment is as deserved as it is pleasing? 

If it has worked well, it is good. Do men gather 
grapes of thorns, or figs of thistles? If it has con- 
tinued to us a long succession of men, deepiy learned, 
wholly impartial, deserving, and clothed with the 
trust, love, and affectionate admiration of all parties 
of the community, does it not afford a reasonable 
ground of inference that there is something in such 
a mode of appointment, and in such a tenure, intrinsi- 
cally^ philosophically adapted to insure such a result? 

Some criticism has been made on the practical ad- 
ministration of our law, which deserves a passing no- 
tice. It requires the less because it has already been 
replied to. 

The gentleman from New Bedford [INIr. French] 
told a story of some one, as I understood him, who 
was about to lose, or had lost, or dared not sue, 
a note of a hundred dollars, because it would cost 
him one hundred and fifty dollars to collect it. A 
very sensible explanation was suggested by the gen- 
tleman from Cambridge [Mr. Parker] just now ; and 
I will venture to advise the gentleman from New 
Bedford in addition, the very first time he sees his 
friend, to recommend to him to change his lawyer as 
quick as he possibly can. As a reason for a change 
of the Constitution, and the tenure of the judicial 
office, it seems to me not particularly cogent. 

The same gentleman remembers that your Su- 
preme Court decided that the fugitive-slave law is 



ON THE JUDICIAL TENURE. 373 

constitutional ; and what makes it the more provok- 
ing is, he knows the decision was wrong. Well, Sir, 
60 said the gentleman from Manchester [Mr. Dana]. 
His sentiments concerning that law and its kindred 
topics do not differ, I suppose, greatl}^ from those of 
the member from New Bedford ; but what did he 
add? "I thank God," he said, "that I have the 
consolation of knowing the decision was made by 
men as impartial as the lot of humanity would admit ; 
and that if judges were elected by the people of Mas- 
sachusetts it would hold out no hope of a different 
decision/' He sees in this, therefore, no cause for 
altering our judicial system on any view of the de- 
cision ; and I believe — though I have never heard 
him say or suggest such a thing — that my friend's 
learning and self-distrust — that ''that learned and 
modest ignorance " Avhich Gibbon recognizes as the 
last and ripest result of the profound knowledge of a 
large mind — will lead him to agree with me, that it 
is barely possible^ considering how strongly that law 
excites the feelings, and thus tends to disturb the 
judgment, considering the vast weight of judicial 
opinion, and of the opinions of public persons in its 
favor ; recalling the first law on that subject, and the 
decision in Prigg and Pennsylvania — and who gave 
the opinion of that Court in that case — that it is 
just barely possible that the gentleman from New 
Bedford does not certainly know that the decision 
was wrong. That he thinks it so, and would lay his 
life down upon it, the energy and the sentiments of 
his speech sufficiently indicate. My difficulty, like 
my friend's from ^lanchester, is to gather out of all 
this indignation the least particle of cause for a 
change of the judicial tenure. 



374 ON THE JUDICIAL TENURE. 

The gentleman from Lowell [Mr. Butler] animad- 
verted somewhat, last evening, on the delays attend- 
ing the publication of the reports of decisions. I had 
made some inquiry concerning the facts, but have been 
completely anticipated in all I would have said by the 
gentleman from Cambridge [Mr. Parker]. To me his 
explanation seems perfectly satisfactory ; and in no 
view of such a question would the good sense of the 
gentleman from Lowell, I think, deem it a reason for 
so vast an innovation as this, on the existing and 
ancient system. 

To another portion of that learned gentleman's 
speech, I have a word to say, in all frankness and 
all candor. Placing his hand on his heart, he ap- 
pealed, with great emphasis of manner, to the honor 
of the bar, as represented in this Convention, whether 
we had not heard complaints of particular acts of 
some of our judges? Sir, that appeal is entitled to a 
frank and honorable response. I have known and 
loved many ; many men ; many women — of tlie liv- 
ing and the dead — of the purest and noblest of 
earth or skies — but I never knew one — I never 
heard of one — if conspicuous enougli to attract a 
considerable observation, whom the breath of cal- 
umny, or of sarcasm, always wholly spared. Did the 
learned gentleman ever know one ? '' Be thou as 
chaste as ice, as pure as snow, thou shalt not escape 
calumny." 

And does he expect that in a profession like ours ; 
overtasked ; disappointed in the results of causes ; 
eager for victory : mortified by unexpected defeat ; 
misunderstanding or failing to api:)reciate the evi- 
dence ; the court sometimes itself jaded and mistaken 



0^ THE JUDICIAL TENURE. 375 

— that we shall not often hear, and often say, hasty 
and harsh things of a judge? I have heard such 
of every judge I ever saw — however revered in his 
general character. Did Mansfield escape? Did Mar- 
shall? Did Parsons? Did Story? What does it 
come to as an argument against the particular judge ; 
still more as an argument against a judicial system? 
Are we to go on altering the mode of appointment, 
and the tenure, till you get a corps of judges, against 
no one of which, no one ever hears anybody say any 
thing ? 

But, Sir, I am to answer the learned gentleman s 
appeal a little farther; and I say upon my honor, 
that I believe it the general opinion of the bar to-day, 
its general opinion ever since I entered the profes- 
sion, that our system of appointment and tenure has 
operated perfectly w^ell ; that the benches and courts 
have been, and are, learned, impartial, entitled to 
trust; and that there is not one member of either 
who, taking his judicial character and life as a whole, 
is not eminently, or adequately, qualified for his 
place. 

Turn, now, from the existing system to the sub- 
stitute which is offered; and see, if you can, how 
that will work. 

It is not enough to take little objections to that 
system, in its general working so satisfactory. He 
who would change it is bound to show that what he 
proposes in place of it will do better. To this, I say, 
it is all a sheer conjectural speculation, yet we see 
and know enough to warrant the most gloomy ap- 
prehensions. 

Consider first, for a moment, the motion immedi- 



376 ON THE JUDICIAL TENURE. 

ately pending ; which proposes the election of judges 
by the people. I said in the outset, I have no fear 
of 3^our sustaining it ; but for the development of a 
full view of the general subject, it will justify some 
attention. 

Gentlemen begin by asking if we are afraid to 
trust the people. Well, Sir, that is a very cunning 
question ; very cunning indeed. Answer it as you 
will, they think they have you. If you answer. Yes, 

— that you are afraid to trust the people, — then 
they cry out. He blasphemeth. If you answer. No, 

— that you are not afraid to trust them, — then they 
reply. Why not permit them to choose their judges ? 

Sir, this dilemma creates no difficulty. I might 
evade it by saying that how^ever ready and however 
habituated to trust the people, it does not follow that 
we should desert a system which has succeeded emi- 
nently, to see if another will not succeed as well. If 
the indirect appointment by the people, appointment 
through the governor whom they choose, has supplied 
a succession of excellent judges, why should I trouble 
them with the direct appointment — however well 
they might conduct it — which they have not soli- 
cited ; which they have not expected ; about which 
you dared not open your mouths during the dis- 
cussion concerning the call of a Convention : in 
regard to which you gave them — it is more correct 
to say — every reason to believe you should make no 
change whatever? Get a Convention by a pledge to 
the people not to make judges elective — and then 
tell us we shall make them elective, on pain of being 
denounced afraid to trust the people ! Will such 
flattery be accepted in atonement for such decepti^^ "^ 



ON THE JUDICIAL TENURE. 377 

But I prefer meeting this dilemma in another way. 
It is a question certainly of some nicety to determine 
what offices the public good prescribes should be 
filled by a direct election of the people ; and what 
should be filled by the appointment of others, as the 
governor and counsel, chosen by the people. On the 
best reflection I have been able to give it, this seems 
to me a safe general proposition. If the nature of 
the office be such, the qualifications which it de- 
mands, and the stage on which they are to be 
displayed be such, that the people can judge of those 
qualifications as well as their agents ; and if, still 
farther, the nature of the office be such that the 
tremendous ordeal of a severely contested popular 
election will not in any degree do it injury, — will 
not deter learned men, if the office needs learning, 
from aspiring to it ; will not tend to make the suc- 
cessful candidate a respecter of persons, if the office 
requires that he should not be ; will not tend to 
weaken the confidence and trust, and affectionate 
admiration of the community towards him, if the 
office requires that such be the sentiments with 
which he should be regarded, — then the people 
should choose by direct election. If, on the other 
hand, from the kind*bf qualifications demanded, and 
the place where their display is to be made, an agent 
of the people, chosen by them for that purpose, can 
judge of the qualifications better than they can ; or if 
from its nature it demands learning, and the terrors 
of a party canvass drive learning from the field ; or 
if it demands impartiality and general confidence, 
and the successful candidate of a party is less likely 
to possess either, — then the indirect appointment by 



378 ON THE JUDICIAL TENURE. 

the people, tliat is, appointment by their agent, is 
wisest. 

Let me illustrate this test by reference to some 
proceedings of the Convention. You have already 
made certain offices elective, which heretofore were 
filled by executive appointment — such as those of 
sheriffs ; the attorney-general ; district-attorneys, and 
others. 

Now, within the test just indicated, I do not know 
why these offices may not be filled by election, if 
anybody has a fancy for it. Take the case of the 
sheriff, for instance. He requires energy, courtesy, 
promptness, — qualities pertaining to character rather, 
and manner, displayed, so to speak, in the open air ; 
palpable, capable of easy and public appreciation. 
Besides, his is an office which the freedom and 
violence of popular elections do not greatly harm. 
There are certain specific duties to do for a compen- 
sation, and if these are well done, it does not much 
signify what a minority or what anybody thinks of 
him. 

Totally unlike this in all things is the case of the 
judge. In the first place, the qualities which fit him 
for the office are quite peculiar ; less palpable, less 
salient, so to speak, less easily and accurately appre- 
ciated by cursory and general notice. They are an 
uncommon, recondite, and difficult learning, and they 
are a certain power and turn of mind and cast of 
character, which, until they come actually, and for a 
considerable length of time, and in many varieties of 
circumstances, to be displayed upon the bench itself, 
may be almost unremarked but by near and profes- 
sional observers. What the public chiefly see is the 



ON THE JUDICIAL TENURE. 379 

effective advocate ; him their first thought would be 
perhaps to make their candidate for judge ; yet ex- 
perience has proved tliat the best advocate is not 
necessarily the best judge, — that the two functions 
exact diverse qualifications, and that brilliant success 
in one holds out no certain promise of success in the 
other. A popular election would have been very 
likely to raise Erskine or Curran to the Bench, if they 
had selected the situation ; but it seems quite certain 
that one failed as Lord Chancellor, and the other as 
Master of the Rolls, and pretty remarkabl3% too, con- 
sidering their extraordinary abilities in the conduct of 
causes of fact at the bar. I have supposed that Lord 
Abinger, who, as Mr. Scarlett, w^on more verdicts 
than any man in England, did not conspicuously 
succeed in the exchequer ; and that, on the other 
hand. Lord Tenterden, to name no more, raised to 
the bench from no practice at all, or none of which 
the public had seen any thing, became, by the fortu- 
nate possession of the specific judicial nature, among 
the most eminent who have presided on it. The trutli 
is, the selection of a judge is a little like that of a 
professor of the higher mathematics or of intellectual 
philosophy. Litimate knowledge of the candidate will 
detect the presence or the absence of the S2)ecialty 
demanded ; the kind of knowdedge of him which the 
community may be expected to gain, will not. On 
this point I submit to the honor and candor of the 
bar in this body an illustration Avhich is worth con- 
sidering. It often happens that our clients propose, 
or that we propose, to associate other counsel witli us 
to aid in presenting the cause to the jury. Li such 
cases we expect and desire them to select their man, 



380 ON THE JUDICIAL TENURE. 

and almost always we think the selection a good one. 
But it sometimes happens, too, that it is decided to 
submit the cause to a lawyer as a referee. And then 
do we expect or wish our client to select the referee ? 
Certainly never. That we know we can do better 
than he, because better than he we appreciate the 
legal aspects of the case, and the kind of mind which 
is required to meet them ; and we should betray the 
client, sacrifice the cause, and shamefully neglect a 
clear duty, if we did not insist on his permitting us, 
for the protection of his interests intrusted to our 
care, to appoint his judge. Always he also desires 
us for his sake to do it. And now, that which we 
would not advise the single client to do for himself, 
shall we advise the whole body of our clients to do 
for themselves? 

But this is, by no means, the principal objection to 
making this kind of office elective. Consider, beyond 
all this, how the office itself is to be affected : its dig- 
nity ; its just weight; the kind of men who will fill it; 
their learning ; their firmness ; their hold on the gen- 
eral confidence — how wdll these be affected? Who 
will make the judge? At present he is appointed 
by a governor, his council concurring, in whom a 
majority of the whole people have expressed their 
trust by electing him, and to whom the minority have 
no objection but his politics ; acting under a direct 
personal responsibility to public opinion ; possessing 
the best conceivable means to ascertain, if he does 
not know, by inquiry at the right sources, who does, 
and who does not possess the character of mind 
and qualities demanded. By such a governor he is 
appointed; and then afterward he is perfectly in- 



ON THE JUDICIAL TENURE. 381 

dependent of him. And how well the appointing 
power in all hands has done its work, let our judicial 
annals tell. But, under an elective system, who will 
make the judge? The young lawyer leaders in the 
caucus of the prevailing party will make him. Will 
they not? Each party is to nominate for the office, 
if the people are to vote for it, is it not ? You know 
it must be so. How will they nominate? In the 
great State caucus, of course, as they nominate for 
governor. On whom will the judicial nominations 
be devolved? On the professional members of the 
caucus, of course. Who will they be? Young, 
ambitious lawyers, very able, possibly, and very de- 
serving ; but not selected by a majority of the whole 
people, nor by a majority, perhaps, of their own 
towns, to do any thing so important and responsible 
as to make a judge, — these will nominate him. The 
part}^ unless the case is very scandalous indeed, will 
sustain its regular nominations ; and thus practically 
a handful of caucus leaders, under this system, will 
appoint the judges of Massachusetts. This is bad 
enough ; because we ought to know who it is that 
elevates men to an office so important — we ought 
to have some control over the nominating power — 
and of these caucus leaders we know nothing; and 
because, also, they will have motives to nominate 
altogether irrespective of the fitness of the nominee 
for the place, on which no governor of this Common- 
wealth, of any party, has ever acted. This is bad 
enough. But it is not all, nor the worst. Trace 
it onwards. So nominated, the candidate is put 
through a violent election; abused by the press, 
abused on the stump, charged ten thousand times 



382 ON THE JUDICIAL TENURE. 

over with being very little of a lawyer, and a good 
deal of a knave or boor ; and after beino^ tossed on 
this kind of blanket for some uneasy months, is 
chosen by a majority of ten votes out of a hundred 
tliousand, and comes into court, breathless, terrified, 
with perspiration in drops on his brow, wondering 
how he ever got there, to take his seat on the bench. 
And in the very first cause he tries, he sees on one 
side the counsel who procured his nomination in 
caucus, and has defended him hy pen and tongue 
before the people, and on the other, the most promi- 
nent of his assailants ; one who has been denying his 
talents, denying his learning, denying his integrity, 
denying him every judicial quality, and ever}^ quality 
that may define a good man, before half the counties 
in the State. Is not this about as infallible a recipe 
as 3'ou could wish to make a judge a respecter of 
persons? Will it not inevitably load iiim with the 
suspicion of partiality, whether he deserves it or not? 
Is it happily calculated altogether to fix on him the 
love, trust, and affectionate admiration of the general 
community with which you agree he ought to be 
clothed, as with a robe, or he fills his great ofiice in 
vain? Who does not shrink from such temptation 
to be partial? Who does not shrink from the sus- 
picion of being thought so? What studious and 
learned man, of a true self-respect, fitted the most 
preeminently for the magistracy by these very quali- 
ties and tastes, would subject himself to an ordeal so 
coarse, and so inappropriate, for the chance of getting 
to a position where no human purity or ability could 
assure him a trial by his merits ? 

But you will not make judges elective. What is to 



ON THE JUDICIAL TENURE. 383 

be feared is, that instead of attempting a larger mis- 
chief, in which you must fail, you will attempt 
a smaller, in which you may succeed. You will 
not change the system which has worked so well, 
very much, you say, but you Avill change it some ; 
and therefore you will continue to appoint by the 
governor. But instead of appointing during good 
behavior, subject to impeachment, and subject to 
removal by the legislature, you will appoint him for 
a term of years — five years, seven years, ten years. 

Well, Sir, without repeating that no reason for any 
change is shown, and that no manner of evidence has 
been produced to prove that this project of execu- 
tive appointment, for limited terms, has ever suc- 
ceeded anywhere — pretty important considerations 
for thoughtful persons, likely to weigh much with 
the people — there are two objections to this system, 
which ought, in my judgment, to put it out of every 
head. And, in the first place, it will assuredly oper- 
ate to keep the ablest men from the bench. You 
all agree that you would have there the ablest man 
whom three thousand dollars or twenty-one hundred 
dollars per annum will command. The problem is, 
one part of the problem is, how shall we get the best 
judge for that money ? 

And now, if my opinion is worth any thing, I de- 
sire to express it with all possible confidence, that 
this change of tenure will infallibly reduce the rate 
of men whom you will have on the bencli. Not 
every one, in all respects equal to it, can afford it 
now. It has been said, and is notorious, that it is 
offered and rejected. The consideration of its per- 
manence is the decisive one in its favor, whoever 



384 ON THE JUDICIAL TENURE. 

accepts it. The salary is inadequate, but if it is cer- 
tain, certain as good judicial behavior — it ought not 
to be more so — it may be thought enough. De- 
prive it of that moral makeweight, and it is nothing. 
Why should a lawyer, accumulating, or living, by 
his practice, look at a judgeship of ten 3'ears? What 
does he see and fear? At the end of that time he is 
to descend from the bench, a man forty-five or fifty 
or sixty years of age, without a dollar, or certainly re- 
quiring some means of increasing his income. Every 
old client is lost by this time, and he is to begin life 
as he began it twenty or thirty years before. Not 
quite so, even. Then he was young, energetic, and 
sanguine. He is older now, and is less disposed to 
the contentious efforts of the law. More than that, 
he is less equal to them for another reason than the 
want of youth. If he has, during the full term of 
ten 3'ears, been good for any thing; if he has been 
"a judge, altogether a judge, and nothing but a 
judge," then his whole intellectual character and 
habits will have undergone a change, itself incapable 
of change. He will have grown out of the lawyer 
into the magistrate. He will have put off the gown 
of the bar, and have assumed the more graceful and 
reverend ermine of the bench. The mental habits, 
the mental faults of the advocate, the faults ascribed 
by satire to the advocate, the faults or habits of his 
character, the zeal, the constant energy bestow^ed on 
all causes alike ; the tendencies, and the power to 
aggravate and intensify one side of a thesis, and 
forget or allow inadequate importance to the other — 
these, if he has been a good judge, or tried his best 
to be a good judge for ten years, he has lost, he has 



ON THE JUDICIAL TENURE. 385 

conquered, and has acquired in their place that 
calmer and that fairer capacity to see the thing, fact, 
or law, just as it is. Thus changed, it will be pain- 
ful to attempt to recover the advocate again ; it will 
be impracticable, if it is attempted. To regain busi- 
ness, he must find new clients ; to find or keep them, 
he must make himself over again. Accordingly, 
how rare are the cases where any man above the age 
of forty, after having served ten years on the bench, 
seeking to cultivate judicial habits, and win a true 
judicial fame, has returned to a full business at 
the bar. I never heard of one. Such a retired 
judge may act as a referee. He may engage some- 
what in chamber practice, as it is called, though the 
result of all my observation has been, that unless he 
can attend Ms opinions through court ; can there ex- 
plain and defend them ; unless he can keep his hand 
so much in that he feels and knows at all times ivhich 
way the judicial mind is teyiding on the open questions 
of the law — his chamber practice holds out a pretty 
slender promise for the decline of a life unprovided 
for. He who would be a lawyer, must unite the 
study of the books and the daily practice of the 
courts, or his very learning will lead him astray. 

I have been amused at the excellent reasons given 
to show why an able man, at tlie head of the bar, in 
full practice, forty years of age, a growing family 
and no property, should just as soon accept a judge- 
ship for ten years as during good behavior. Some 
say a judge never lives but ten years on the bench — 
or thirteen at the outside — anyhow. They show 
statistics for it. They propose, therefore, to go to 
such a man and tender him the situation. He will 

25 



386 ON THE JUDICIAL TENURE. 

inconsiderately answer that he should like the bench; 
thinks he could do something for the law ; should re- 
joice to give his life to it; but that the prospect of 
coming off at fifty, and going back to begin battling 
it again with '' these younger strengths," is too 
dreary, and he must decline. " Bless you," say the 
gentlemen, '' don't trouble yourself about that, if 
that is all. You can't live but thirteen years, the 
best way you can fix it. Here is the secretary's re- 
port — with a printed list as long as a Harvard Col- 
lege catalogue — putting that out of all question!" 
Do you think this will persuade him ? Does he ex- 
pect to die in ten years ? Who does so ? Did the 
names on these statistics ? 

Others guess that the ten-years judge will be reap- 
pointed, if he behaves well. But unless he is a very 
weak man indeed, will he rely on that? Who will 
assure it to him ? Does he not know enough of life 
to know how easy it will be, after he has served the 
State, the law, his conscience and his God for the 
stipulated term ; after the performance of his duty 
has made this ambitious young lawyer or that power- 
ful client his enemy for life ; after having thus stood 
in the way of a greedy competitor too loug — how 
easy it will be to bring influences to bear on a new 
governor, just come in at the head of a flushed and 
eager party, to allow the old judge's commission to 
expire, and appoint the right sort of a man in his 
place ? Does he not know how easy it will be to say, 
'' Yes, he is a good judge enough, but no better than 
a dozen others who have just put you in power ; 
there are advantages in seating a man on the bench 
who is fresh from the bar; there is no injustice to 



ON THE JUDICIAL TENURE. 387 

the incumbent — didn't he know that he ran this 
risk ? " Too well he knows it, Sir, to be tickled by 
the chance of " finding the doom of man reversed for 
him,"' and he will reject the offer. 

Herein is great and certain evil. How you can 
disregard it — how you can fail to appreciate what an 
obvious piece of good economy it is ; economy worthy 
of statesmen — binding on your conscience; to so 
construct 3'our system as to gain for the bench the 
best man whom three thousand dollars per annum 
can be made to command, passes all comprehension. 
Surely you will not reply that there " will be enough 
others to take it." If the tendency of what you pro- 
pose is appreciably to lessen the chances of obtaining 
the best, is it any excuse to say that fools will rush in 
where others will not tread? 

But there is still another difficulty. He who does 
accept it, and performs as an hireling his day, will 
not oidy be an ordinary man comparatively, at the 
start, but he holds a place, and is subjected to influ- 
ences, under which it will be impossible to maintain 
impartiality, and the reputation of impartiality ; im- 
possible to earn and keep that trust, and confidence, 
and affectionate and respectful regard, which the 
judge must have, or he is but half a judge. 

I have sometimes thought that the tenure of good 
behavior has one effect a little like that which is pro- 
duced by making the marriage tie indissoluble. If 
the "contract which renovates the world "were at 
the pleasure of both parties, they would sometimes, 
often, quarrel and bring about a dissolution in a 
month. But they know they have embarked for life 
— for good and ill — for better and worse ; and they 



388 ON THE JUDICIAL TENURE. 

bear with one another ; they excuse one another — 
they help one another — they make each other to be 
that which their eyes and their hearts desire. A 
little so in the relation of the judge to the bar and 
the community. You want to invest him with honor, 
love, and confidence. If every time when he rules 
on a piece of evidence, or charges the jury, a J^oung 
lawyer can say, half aloud in the bar, or his disap- 
pointed client can go to the next tavern to say, " My 
good fellow, we will have you down here in a year or 
two — you shall answer for this — make the most of 
your time" — and so forth; is it favorable to the 
culture of such sentiments? Does it tend to beget 
that state of mind towards him in the community 
which prompts "the ear to bless him, and the eye 
to give witness to him ? " Does it tend in him to 
'' ripen that dignity of disposition which grows with 
the growth of an illustrious reputation ; and becomes 
a sort of pledge to the public for security ? " Show 
to the bar, and to the people, a judge by whom 
justice is to be dispensed for a lifetime, and all 
become mutually cooperative, respectful, and at- 
tached. 

And still further. This ten-years judge of yours 
is placed in a situation where he is in extreme 
danger of feeling, and of being suspected of feeling 
so anxious a desire to secure his reappointment, as 
to detract, justly or unjustly, somewhat from that 
confidence in him without which there is no judge. 
It is easy for the gentleman from Abington [Mr. 
Keyes] to feel and express, with his habitual energy, 
indignation at the craven spirit which could stoop to 
do any thing to prolong his term of office ? It is easy, 



ON THE JUDICIAL TENURE. 389 

but is it to the purpose? All systems of judicial 
appointment and tenure suppose the judge to be a 
mortal man, after all ; and all of them that are wise, 
and well tried, aim to fortify, guard, and help that 
which his Maker has left fallible and infirm. To 
inveigh against the lot of humanity is idle. Our 
business is to make the best of it ; to assist its weak- 
ness ; make the most of its virtue ; by no means, by 
no means to lead it into any manner of temptation. 
He censures God, I have heard, who quarrels with 
the imperfections of man. Do you not, however, 
tempt the judge, as his last years are coming, to 
cast about for reappointment ; to favor a little more 
this important party, or this important counsel, by 
whom the patronage of the future is to be dispensed? 
He will desire to keep his place, will he not? You 
have disqualified him for the more active practice of 
his profession. He needs its remuneration. Those 
whom he loves depend on it. The man who can 
give it, or withhold it, is before him for what he calls 
justice ; on the other side is a stranger without a 
name. Have you placed him in no peril ? Have 
you so framed your system, as to do all that human 
wisdom can do — to " secure a trial as impartial as 
the lot of humanity will admit"? If not, are we 
quite equal to the great work we have taken in 
hand? 

There are two or three more general observations 
with which I leave the subject, which the pressure 
on your time, and my own state of health, unfit me 
for thoroughly discussing. 

In constructing our judicial system, it seems to me 
not unwise so to do it, that it shall rather operate, if 



390 ON THE JUDICIAL TENURE. 

possible, to induce young lawyers to aspire to the 
honors of the bench, not by means of party politics, 
but by devoting themselves to the still and deep 
studies of this glorious science of the law. A re- 
public, it is said, is one great scramble for office, from 
the hiechest to the lowest in the State. The ten- 
dencies certainly are to make every place a spoil for 
the victor, and to present to abilities and ambition 
active service in the ranks of party^ victory under the 
banner^ and hy the warfare of party^ as the quickest 
and easiest means of winning every one. How full 
of danger to justice, and to security, and to liberty, 
are such tendencies, I cannot here and now pause to 
consider. Tliese very changes of the judicial system, 
facilitating the chances of getting on the bench by 
part}^ merits and party titles, will give strength in- 
calculable to such tendencies. How much wiser to 
leave it as now, were it only to present motives to 
the better youth of the profession to withdraw from 
a too active and vehement political life ; to conceive, 
in the solitude of their libraries, the idea of a great 
judicial fame and usefulness ; and by profound study 
and the manly practice of the profession alone seek 
to realize it ; to so prepare themselves, in mind, at- 
tainments, character, to become judges by being 
lawyers only, that Avhen the ermine should rest on 
them, it should find, as was said of Jay — as might 
be said of more than one on the bench of both our 
Courts, of one trained by our system for the bench 
of the Supreme National Court — it should find 
" nothing that was not whiter than itself." 

I do not know how far it is needful to take notice 
of an objection by the gentleman from Fall River 



ON THE JUDICIAL TENURE. 391 

[Mr. Hooper,] and less or more by others, to the 
existing system, on the ground that it is monarchical, 
or anti-republican, or somehow inconsistent with our 
general theories of liberty. He has dwelt a good 
deal on it ; he says we might just as well appoint 
a governor or a representative for life, or good be- 
havior, as a judge ; that it is fatally incompatible 
with our frame of government, and the great prin- 
ciples on which it reposes. One word to this. It 
seems to me that such an argument forgets that our 
political S3'stem, while it is purely and intensely re- 
publican, within all theories, aims to accomplish a 
twofold object, to wit : liberty and security. To 
accomplish this twofold object we have established 
a twofold set of institutions and instrumentalities ; 
some of them designed to develop and give utterance 
to one ; some of the.n dj3ig:.ed to provide perma- 
nently and constantly for the other ; some of them 
designed to bring out the popular will in its utmost 
intensity of utterance ; some of them designed to 
secure life, and liberty, and character, and happi- 
ness, and property, and equal and exact justice, 
against all will, and against all power. These in- 
stitutions and instrumentalities in their immediate 
mechanism and workings are as distinct and diverse, 
one from the other, as they are in their offices, and in 
their ends. But each one is the more perfect for the 
separation ; and the aggregate result is our own 
Massachusetts. 

Thus, in the law-making department, and in the 
whole department of elections to office of those who 
make and those who execute the law, you give the 
utmost assistance to the expression of liberty. You 



392 ON THE JUDICIAL TENURE. 

give the choice to the people. You make it an 
annual choice ; you give it to the majority ; you 
make, moreover, a free press ; you privilege debate ; 
you give freedom to worship God according only to 
the dictates of the individual conscience. These are 
the mansions of liberty ; here are her arms, and here 
her chariot. In these institutions we provide for 
her ; we testify our devotion to her ; we show forth 
how good and how gracious she is — what energies 
she kindles ; what happiness she scatters ; what 
virtues, what talents wait on her — vivifying every 
atom, living in every nerve, beating in every pulsa- 
tion. 

But to the end that one man, that the major- 
ity, may not deprive any of life, liberty, property, 
the opportunity of seeking happiness, there are in- 
stitutions of security. There is a Constitution to 
control the government. There is a separation of 
departments of government. There is a judiciary 
to interpret and administer the laws, "that every 
man may find his security therein." And in consti- 
tuting these provisions for security, you may have 
regard mainly to the specific and separate objects 
which they have in view. You may very fitly 
appoint few judges only. You may very fitly so 
appoint them as to secure learning, impartiality, the 
love and confidence of the State ; because thus best 
they will accomplish the sole ends for which they 
are created at all. If to those ends, too, it has been 
found, in the long run, as human nature is, that it is 
better to give them a tenure of good behavior, you 
may do so without departing in the least degree from 
either of the two great objects of our political system. 



ON THE JUDICIAL TENURE. 393 

You promote one of them directl}- by doing so. You 
do it without outrage on the other. Your security 
is greater ; your liberty is not less. You assign to 
liberty her place, her stage, her emotions, her cere- 
monies ; you assign to law and justice theirs. The 
stage, the emotions, the visible presence of liberty, 
are in the mass meeting; the procession by torch- 
light ; at the polls ; in the halls of legislation ; in 
the voices of the press ; in the freedom of political 
speech ; in the energy, intelligence and hope, which 
pervade the mass ; in the silent, unreturning tide 
of progression. But there is another apartment, 
smaller, humbler, more quiet, down in the basement 
story of our capitol — appropriated to justice, to 
security, to reason, to restraint ; where there is no 
respect of persons ; where there is no high nor low, 
no strong nor weak ; where will is nothing, and power 
is nothing, and numbers are nothing — and all are 
equal, and all secure, before the law. Is it a sound 
objection to your system, that in that apartment you 
do not find the symbols, the cap, the flag of freedom? 
Is it any objection to a court-room that you cannot 
hold a mass meeting in it while a trial is proceeding ? 
Is liberty abridged, because the procession returning 
by torchlight, from celebrating anticipated or actual 
party victor}^, cannot pull down a half dozen houses 
of the opposition with impunity ; and because its 
leaders awake from the intoxications of her saturnalia 
to find themselves in jail for a riot? Is it any ob- 
jection that every object of the political system is not 
equally provided for in every part of it ? No, Sir. 
" Every thing in its place, and a place for every 
thing ! " If the result is an aggregate of social and 



394 ON THE JUDICIAL TENURE. 

political perfection^ absolute security combined with as 
much liberty as you can live in^ that is the state for 
you ! Thank God for that ; let the flag wave over 
it ; die for it ! 

One word only, further, and I leave this subject. 
It has been maintained, with great force of argument, 
by my friend for Manchester, that there is no call by 
the people for any change of the judicial system. 
Certainly there is no proof of such a call. The 
documentary history of the Convention utterly dis- 
proves it. But that topic is exhausted. I wished to 
add only, that my own observation, as far as it has 
gone, disproves it too. I have lost a good many 
causes, first and last ; and I hope to try, and expect 
to lose, a good many more ; but I never heard a 
client in my life, however dissatisfied with the 
verdict, or the charge, say a word about changing 
the tenure of the judicial office. I greatly doubt, if 
I have heard as many as three express themselves 
dissatisfied with the judge ; though times without 
number they have regretted that he found himself 
compelled to go against them. My own tenure I 
have often thought in danger — but I am yet to see 
the first client who expressed a thought of meddling 
with that of the court. What is true of those clients, 
is true of the whole people of Massachusetts. Sir, 
that people have two traits of character — just as our 
political^ system in which that character is shown 
forth has two great ends. They love liberty ; that 
is one trait. They love it, and they possess it to 
their hearts' content. Free as storms to-day do they 
not know it, and feel it — every one of them, from 
the sea to the Green Mountains ? But there is 



ON THE JUDICIAL TENURE. 395 

another side to their character; and that is the old 
Anglo-Saxon instinct of property; the rational and 
the creditable desire to be secure in life, in repu- 
tation, in the earnings of daily labor, in the little all 
which makes up the treasures and the dear charities 
of the humblest home ; the desire to feel certain 
when they come to die that the last wdll shall be 
kept, the smallest legacy of affection shall reach its 
object, although the giver is in his grave ; this desire, 
and the sound sense to know that a learned, impar- 
tial, and honored judiciary is the only means of 
having it indulged. They have nothing timorous in 
them, as touching the largest liberty. They rather 
like the exhilaration of crowding sail on the noble 
old ship, and giving her to scud away before a four- 
teen-knot breeze; but they know, too, that if the 
storm comes on to blow ; and the masts go over- 
board ; and the gun-deck is rolled under water ; and 
the lee shore, edged with foam, thunders under her 
stern, that the sheet anchor and best bower then are 
every thing ! Give them good ground-tackle, and 
they will carry her round the world, and back again, 
till there shall be no more sea. 



396 THE PRESERVATION OF THE UNION. 



SPEECH DELIVERED AT THE CONSTITU- 
TIONAL MEETING IN FANEUIL HALL. 

NOVEMBER 26, 1850. 



[" The Citizens of Boston and its vicinity, who reverence the 
Constitution of the United States ; who wish to discountenance 
a spirit of disobedience to the laws of the land, and refer all 
questions arising under those laws to the proper tribunals ; who 
would regard w'ith disfavor all further popular agitation of sub- 
jects which endanger the peace and harmony of the Union, and 
who deem the preservation of the Union the paramount duty of 
every citizen, are requested to meet and express their sentiments 
on the present posture of public affairs, in Faneuil Hall, Nov. 
26, 1850, at 4 o'clock p.m." 

The above call having been published in the newspapers, and 
posted up in the " Merchants' Reading Room" for some days, 
received the signatures of about five thousand citizens of Massa- 
chusetts, and the meeting was convened agreeably to the request 
therein expressed. 

At a few minutes before four o'clock the Committee of Ar- 
rangements came in, and were received with loud cheers. At 
four o'clock, precisely, Thomas B. Curtis, Esq., mounted the 
rostrum, and nominated for President John C. Warren. 

A series of resolutions having been read, the meeting was 
addressed by B. R. Curtis, B. F. Hallett, and S. D. Bradford; 
after which Mr. Choate spoke as follows :] 

I FEEL it, Fellow-citizens, to be quite needless, for 
any purpose of affecting your votes now, or your 
judgment and acts for the future, that I should add 



THE PRESERVATION OF THE UNION. 397 

a word to the resolutions before you, and to the very 
able addresses by which they have been explained 
and enforced. All that I would have said has been 
better said. In all that I would have suggested, 
this great assembly, so true and ample a representa- 
tion of the sobriety, and principle, and business, and 
patriotism of this city and its vicinity, — if I may 
judge from the manner in which you have responded 
to the sentiments of preceding speakers, — has far 
outrun me. In all that I had felt and reflected on 
the supreme importance of this deliberation, on the 
reality and urgency of the peril, on the indispensable 
necessity which exists, that an effort be made, and 
made at once, combining the best counsels, and the 
wisest and most decisive action of the community, — an 
effort to turn away men's thoughts from those things 
which concern this part or that part, to those which 
concern the whole of our America — to turn away 
men's solicitude about the small politics that shall 
give a State administration this year to one set, and 
the next year to another set, and fix it on the grander 
politics by which a nation i^ to be held together — 
to turn away men's hearts from loving one bi'other of 
the national household, and hating: and revilinsf an- 
other, to that larger, juster, and wiser affection which 
folds the whole household to its bosom — to turn away 
men's conscience and sense of moral obligation from 
the morbid and mad pursuit of a single duty, and 
indulgence of a single sentiment, to the practical 
ethics in which all duties are recognized, by which 
all duties are reconciled, and adjusted, and subordi- 
nated, according to their rank, by which the sacred- 
ness of compacts is holden to be as real as the virtue 



398 THE PRESERVATION OF THE UNION. 

I 

of compassion, and the supremacy of the law declared \ 
as absolute as the luxury of a tear is felt to be sweet 

— to turn awa}^ men's eyes from the glare of the 
lights of a philanthropy — they call it philanthropy — 
some of whose ends may be specious, but whose 
means are bad faith, abusive speech, ferocity of tem- 
per, and resistance to law; and whose fruit, if it ripens 
to fruit, will be woes unnumbered to bond and free, 

— to turn all eyes from the glitter of such light to 
the steady and unalterable glory of that wisdom, that 
justice, and that best philanthropy under which the 
States of America have been enabled and ma}^ still be 
enabled to live together in peace, and grow together 
into the nature of one people, — in all that I had felt 
and reflected on these things, you have outrun my 
warmest feelings and my best thoughts. What re- 
mains, then, but that I congratulate you on at least 
this auspicious indication, and take my leave ? One 
or two suggestions, however, you will pardon to the 
peculiarity of the times. 

I concur then,^rs^. Fellow-citizens, with one of the 
resolutions, in expressing my sincerest conviction that 
the Union is in extreme peril this day. Some good 
and wise men, I know, do not see this ; and some not 
quite so good or wise deny that they see it. I know 
very well that to sound a false alarm is a shallow and 
contemptible thing. But I know, also, that too much 
precaution is safer than too little, and I believe that 
less than the utmost is too little now. Better, it is 
said, to be ridiculed for too much care, than to be 
ruined by too confident a security. I have then a pro- 
found conviction that the Union is yet in danger. It 
is true that it has passed through one peril within 



THE PKESERVATION OF THE UNION. 399 

the last few months, — such a peril, that the future 
historian of America will pause with astonishment 
and terror when he comes to record it. The sobriety 
of the historic style will rise to eloquence, — to pious 
ejacuLation, — to thanksgivings to Almighty God, — as 
he sketches that scene and the virtues that triumphed 
in it. " Honor and praise," will he exclaim, " to the 
eminent men of all parties — to Clay, to Cass, to 
Foote, to Dickinson, to Webster — who rose that day 
to the measure of a true greatness, — who remembered 
that they had a country to preserve as well as a local 
constituency to gratify, — who laid all the wealth, 
and all the hopes of illustrious lives on the altar of a 
hazardous patriotism, — who reckoned all the sweets 
of a present popularity for nothing in comparison of 
that more exceeding weight of glory which follows 
him who seeks to compose an agitated and save a 
sinking land." 

That night is passed, and that peril ; and yet it is 
still night, and there is peril still. And what do I 
mean by this ? I believe, and rejoice to believe, that 
the general judgment of the people is j-et sound on 
this transcendent subject. But I will tell you where 
I think the danger lies. It is, that while the people 
sleep, politicians and philanthropists of the legislative 
hall — the stump, and the press — will talk and write 
us out of our Union. Yes — while you sleep, while 
the merchant is loading his ships, and the farmer is 
gathering his harvests, and the music of the hammer 
and shuttle wake around, and we are all steeped in the 
enjoyment of that vast and various good wdiich a com- 
mon government places within our reach — there are 
influences that never sleep, and which are creating 



I 



400 THE PRESERVATION OF THE UNION. 

and diffusing a public opinion, in whose hot and 
poisoned breath, before we yet perceive our evil plight, 
this Union may melt as frost-work in the sun. Do 
we sufficiently appreciate how omnipotent is opinion 
in the matter of all government? Do we consider 
especially in how true a sense it is the creator, must 
be the upholder, and may be the destroyer of our 
united government? Do we often enough advert to 
the distinction, that while our State governments 
must exist almost of necessity, and with no effort 
from within or without, the Union of the States is 
a totally different creation — more delicate, more arti- 
ficial, more recent, far more truly a mere production 
of the reason and the will — standing in far more 
need of an ever-surrounding care, to preserve and 
repair it, and urge it along its highway? Do we 
reflect that while the people of Massachusetts, for 
example, are in all senses one — not E Plurihus 
Unum — but one single and uncompounded sub- 
stance, so to speak — and while ever}" influence that 
can possibly help to hold a social existence together 
— identity of interest; closeness of kindred; conti- 
guity of place ; old habit ; the ten thousand opportuni- 
ties of daily intercourse ; every thing — is operating 
to hold such a State together, so that it must exist 
whether we will or not, and " cannot, but by anni- 
hilating, die " — the people of America compose a 
totally different community — a community miscella- 
neous and widely scattered ; that the}^ are many 
States, not one State, or, if one, made up of many which 
still coexist; that numerous influences of vast energy, 
influences of situation, of political creeds, of employ- 
ments, of supposed or real diversities of material in- 



THE PRESERVATION OF THE UNION. 401 

terest, tend evermore to draw them asunder ; and 
that is not, as in a single State, that instinct, custom, 
a long antiquity, closeness of kindred, immediate con- 
tiguity, the personal intercourse of daily life and the 
like, come in to make and consolidate the grand in- 
corporation, whether we will or not ; but that is to 
be accompHshed by carefully cultivated and acquired 
habits and states of feeling ; by an enlightened dis- 
cernment of great interests, embracing a continent 
and a future age ; by a voluntary determination to 
love, honor, and cherish, by mutual tolerance, by 
mutual indulgence of one another's peculiarities, by 
the most politic and careful withdrawal of our atten- 
tion from the offensive particulars in which we differ, 
and by the most assiduous development and apprecia- 
tion, and contemplation of those things wherein we 
are alike — do we reflect as we ought, that it is only 
thus — by varieties of expedients, by a prolonged and 
voluntary educational process, that the fine and strong 
spirit of NATIONALITY may be made to penetrate and 
animate the scarcely congruous mass — and the full 
tide of American feeling to fill the mighty heart ? 

I have sometimes thought that the States in our 
system may be compared to the primordial particles 
of matter, indivisible, indestructible, impenetrable, 
whose natural condition is to repel each other, or, 
at least, to exist in their own independent identity, 
— while the Union is an artificial aggregation of 
such particles ; a sort of forced state^ as some have 
said, of life ; a complex structure made with hands, 
which gravity, attrition, time, rain, dew, frost, not 
less than tempest and earthquake, cooperate to w^aste 
away, and which the anger of a fool — or the laughter 

26 



402 THE PRESERVATION OF THE UNION. 

of a fool — may bring down in an hour ; a system of 
bodies advancing slowly through a resisting medium^ 
operating at all times to retard, and at any moment 
liable to arrest its motion ; a beautiful, yet fragile 
creation, which a breath can unmake, as a breath has 
made it. 

And now, charged with the trust of holding to- 
gether such a nation as this, what have we seen? 
What do we see to-day? Exactly this. It has been 
for many months — years, I may say ; but, assuredly 
for a long season — the peculiar infelicity, say, 
rather, terrible misfortune of this country, that the 
attention of the people has been fixed without the 
respite of a moment, exclusively, on one of those 
subjects — the only one — on which we disagree pre- 
cisel}' according to geographical lines. And not so 
only, but this subject has been one — unlike tariff, 
or internal improvements, or the disbursement of the 
public money, on which the dispute cannot be main- 
tained, for an hour, without heat of blood, mutual 
loss of respect, alienation of regard — menacing to 
end in hate, strong and cruel as the grave. 

I call this only a terrible misfortune. I blame 
here and now no man and no policy for it. Circum- 
stances have forced it upon us all ; and down to the 
hour that the series of compromise measures was 
completed and presented to the country, or certainly 
to congress, I will not here and now say, that it was 
the fault of one man, or one region of country, or 
one party more than another. 

" But the pity of it, lago — the pity of it ! *' 



THE PRESERVATION OF THE UNION. 403 

How appalling have been its effects ; and how deep 
and damning will be his guilt who rejects the oppor- 
tunity of reconcilement, and continues this accursed 
agitation, Avithout necessity, for another hour ! 

Wh}', is there any man so bold or blind as to say 
he believes that the scenes through which we have 
been passing, for a year, have left the American heart 
where they found it? Does any man believe that 
those affectionate and respectful regards, that attach- 
ment and that trust, those " cords of love and bands 
of a man " — which knit this people together as one, 
in an earlier and better time, — are as strong to-day 
as they were a year ago ? Do you believe that there 
can have been so tremendous an apparatus of influ- 
ences at work so long, some designed, some unde- 
signed, but all at work in one way, that is, to make 
the two great divisions of the national family hate 
each other, and yet have no effect ? Recall what we 
have seen in that time, and weigh it well ! Consider 
how many hundreds of speeches were made in con- 
gress — all to show how extreme and intrepid an advo- 
cate the speaker could be of the extreme Northern 
sentiment, or the extreme Southern sentiment. Con- 
sider how many scores of thousands of every one of 
those speeches were printed and circulated among the 
honorable member's constituents, — not much else- 
where, — the great mass of whom agreed with him per- 
fectly, and was only made the more angry and more 
unreasonable by them. Consider what caballings and 
conspirings were going forward during that session in 
committee rooms and members' chambers, and think 
of their private correspondence with enterprising 
waiters on events. Turn to the American newspaper 



404 , THE PRESERVATION OF THE UNION. 

press, secular and religious — every editor — or how 
vast a proportion ! transformed into a manufacturer 
of mere local opinion — local opinion — local opinion 

— working away at his battery — big or little — as if 
it were the most beautiful operation in the world to 
persuade one half of the people how unreasonable 
and how odious were the other half. Think of con- 
ventions sitting for secession and dismemberment, by 
the very tomb of Jackson — the "buried majesty" 
not rising to scatter and blast them. Call to mind 
how many elections have been holden — stirring the 
wave of the people to its profoundest depths — all 
turning on this topic. Remember how few of all 
who help to give direction to general sentiment, how 
few in either house of congress, what a handful only 
of editors and preachers and talkers have ventured 
anywhere to breathe a word above a whisper to hush 
or divert the pelting of this pitiless storm ; and then 
consider how delicate and sensitive a thing is pul)lic 
opinion, — how easy it is to mould and color and 
kindle it, and yet that, when moulded and colored 
and fired, not all the bayonets and artillery of Bo- 
rodino can maintain the government which it decrees 
to perish ; and say if you have not been encompassed, 
and are not now, by a peril awful indeed ! Say if 
3^ou believe it possible that a whole people can go on 

— a reading and excitable people — hearing nothing, 
reading nothing, talking- of nothing, thinking of 
nothing, sleeping and waking on nothing, for a year, 
but one incessant and vehement appeal to the strong- 
est of their passions, — to the pride, anger, and fear 
of the South, to the philanthropy, humanity, and 
conscience of the North, — one half of it aimed to 



THE PRESERVATION OF THE UNION. 405 

persuade you that they were cruel, ambitious, indo- 
lent, and licentious, and therefore hateful ; and the 
other half of it to persuade them that 3^ou were 
desperately and hypocritically fanatical and aggres- 
sive, and therefore hateful — say, if an excitable 
people can go through all this, and not be the worse 
for it ! I tell you nay. Such a year has sowed the 
seed of a harvest, which, if not nipped in the bud, 
will grow to armed men, hating with the hate of the 
brothers of Thebes. 

It seems to me as if our hearts were changing. 
Ties the strongest, influences the sweetest, seem 
falling asunder as smoking flax. I took up, the day 
before yesterday, a religious newspaper, published in 
this city, a leading Orthodox paper, I may describe it, 
to avoid misapprehension. The first thing which met 
my eye was what purported to be an extract from a 
Southern religious newspaper, denouncing the Boston 
editor, or one of his contributors, as an infidel — in 
just so many words — on the ground that one of his 
anti-slavery arguments implied a doctrine inconsistent 
with a certain text of the New Testament. Surely, I 
said to myself, the Christian thus denounced will be 
deeply wounded by such misconstruction ; and as he 
lives a thousand miles away from slavery, as it really 
does not seem to be his business, as it neither picks 
his pocket nor breaks his leg, and he may, therefore, 
afford to be cool, while his Southern brother lives in 
the very heart of it, and may, naturally enough, be a 
little more sensitive, he will try to soothe him, and 
win him, if he can, to reconsider and retract so 
grievous an objurgation. No such thing ! To be 
called an infidel, says he, by this Southern Presby- 



406 THE PRESERVATION OF THE UNION. 

terian, I count a real honor ! He thereupon proceeds 
to denounce the slave-holding South as a downright 
Sodom, — leaves a pretty violent implication that his 
Presbyterian antagonist is not one of its few right- 
eous, whoever else is — and without more ado sends 
him adrift. Yes, Fellow-citizens, more than the 
Methodist Episcopal Church is rent in twain. But 
if these things are done in the green tree, what shall 
be done in the dry ? If the spirit of Christianity is 
not of power sufficient to enable its avowed profes- 
sors to conduct this disputation of hatred with tem- 
per and decorum, — to say nothing of charity, — 
what may we expect from the hot blood of men who 
own not, nor comj^rehend the law of love ? 

I have spoken what I think of the danger that 
threatens the Union. I have done so more at length 
than I could have wished, because I know that, 
upon the depth of our convictions and the sincerity 
of our apprehensions upon this subject, the views 
we shall take of our duties and responsibilities must 
all depend. 

If y )U concur with me that there is danger, you 
will concur with me, in the second place, that thought- 
ful men have something to do to avert it ; and what 
is that? It is not, in my judgment. Fellow-citizens, 
by stereotyped declamation on the utilities of the 
Union to South or North that we can avert the 
danger. It is not b}^ shutting our eyes and ears to it 
that we can avert it. It is not by the foolish prattle 
of " Oh, those people off there need the Union more 
than we, and will not dare to quit." It is not by 
putting arms a-kimbo here or there and swearing 
that we will stand no more bullying; and if any- 



THE PRESERVATION OF THE UNION. 407 

body has a mind to dissolve the Union, let him go 
ahead. Not thus, not thus, felt and acted that gen- 
eration of our fathers, who, out of distracted counsels, 
the keen jealousies of States, and a decaying nation- 
ality, by patience and temper as admirable as their 
wisdom, constructed the noble and proportioned 
fabric of our federal system. " Oh, rise some other 
such ! " 

No, Fellow-citizens — there is something more and 
other for us to do. And what is that? Among 
other things, chiefly this : to accept that whole body 
of measures of compromise, as they are called, by 
which the government has sought to compose the 
country, in the spirit of 1787, — and then that hence- 
forward every man, according to his measure, and in 
his place, in his party, in his social, or his literary, or 
his religious circle, in whatever maj^ be his sphere of 
influence, set himself to suppress the further political 
agitation of this whole subject. 

Of these measures of compromise I ma}^ say, in 
general, that they give the whole victory to neither 
of the great divisions of the country, and are there- 
fore the fitter to form the basis of a permanent ad- 
justment. I think that under their operation and by 
the concurrence of other agencies it will assuredly 
come to pass, that on all that vast accession of 
territory beyond and above Texas no slave will 
ever breathe the air, and I rejoice at that. They 
abolish the slave-trade in the District of Columbia, 
and I rejoice at that. They restore the fugitive to 
the master, — and while I mourn that there is a slave 
who needs to run, or a master who desires to pursue, 
[ should be unworthy of the privilege of addressing 



408 THE PRESERVATION OF THE UNION. 

this assembly, if I did not declare that I have not a 
shadow of doubt that congress has the constitutional 
power to pass this law just as it is, and had no doubt, 
before I listened to the clear and powerful argument 
of Mr. Curtis to-night, that it was out of all question 
their duty to pass some effectual law on the subject, 
and that it is incumbent on every man who recog- 
nizes a single obligation of citizenship to assist, in his 
spheres, in its execution. 

Accepting, then, these measures of constitutional 
compromise, in the spirit of Union, let us set our- 
selves to suppress or mitigate the political agitation 
of slavery. 

And^ in the first place, I submit that the two great 
political parties of the North are called upon by every 
consideration of patriotism and duty to strike this 
whole subject from their respective issues. I go for 
no amalgamation of parties, and for the forming of 
no new party. But I admit the deepest solicitude 
that those which now exist, preserving their actual 
organization and general princijDles and aims, — if so 
it must be, — should to this extent coalesce. Neither 
can act in this behalf effectually alone. Honorable 
concert is indispensable, and they owe it to the 
country. Have not the eminent men of both these 
great organizations united on this adjustment ? Are 
they not both primarily national parties ? Is it not 
one of their most important and beautiful uses that 
they extend the whole length and breadth of our 
land, and that they help or ought to help to hold the 
extreme North to the extreme South by a tie stronger 
almost than that of mere patriotism, by that surest 
cement of friendship, — common opinions on the 



THE PRESERVATION OF THE UNION. 409 

great concerns of the Republic ? You are a Demo- 
crat ; and have jou not for thirty-two years in fifty 
united with the universal Democratic party in the 
choice of Southern presidents? Has it not been 
.your function for even a larger part of the last half 
century to rally with the South for the support of 
the general administration? Has it not ever been 
your boast, your merit as a party, that you are in an 
intense, and even characteristic degree, national and 
Unionist in your spirit and politics, although you 
had your origin in the assertion of State rights ; that 
you have contributed in a thousand ways to the 
extension of our territory and the establishment of 
our martial fame; and that you follow the flag on 
whatever field or deck it waves? — and will you for 
the sake of a temporary victory in a State, or for any 
other cause, insert an article in your creed and give a 
direction to your tactics which shall detach you from 
such companionship and unfit you for such service in 
all time to come ? 

You are a Whig — I give you my hand on that — 
and is not 3-our party national too ? Do you not find 
your fastest allies at the South ? Do you not need 
the vote of Louisiana, of North Carolina, of Tennes- 
see, of Kentucky, to defend you from the redundant 
capital, matured skill, and pauper labor of Europe? 
Did you not just now, with a wise contempt of sec- 
tional issues and sectional noises, unite to call tliat 
brave, firm, and good Old Man from his plantation, 
and seat him with all the honors in the place of 
Washington? Circumstances have forced both of 
these parties — the Northern and the Southern divi- 
sions of both — to suspend for a space the legitimate 



410 THE PRESERVATION OF THE UNION. 

objects of their institution. For a space, laying them 
aside, and resolving ourselves into our individual 
capacities, we have thought and felt on nothing but 
slavery. Those circumstances exist no longer, — 
and shall we not instantly revive the old creeds, 
renew the old ties, and by manly and honorable con- 
cert resolve to spare America that last calamity, — 
the formation of parties according to geographical 
lines ? 

I maintain, in the second place, that the Con- 
science of this community has a duty to do, not 
3^et adequately performed ; and that is, on grounds 
of moral obligation, not merely to call up men to 
the obedience of law, but on the same grounds to 
discourage and modify the further agitation of this 
topic of slavery, m the spirit in tvhich, thus far, that 
agitation has been conducted. I mean to say, that our 
moral duties, not at all less than our political in- 
terests, demand that we accept this compromise, and 
that we promote the peace it is designed to restore. 

Fellow-citizens, was there ever a development of 
sheer fanaticism more uninstructed, or more danger- 
ous than that which teaches that conscience pre- 
scribes the continued political, or other exasperating 
agitation of this subject? That it will help, in the 
least degree, to ameliorate the condition of one slave, 
or to hasten the day of his emancipation, I do not 
believe, and no man can be certain that he knows. 
But the philanthropist, so he qualifies himself, will 
say that slavery is a relation of wrong, and, whatever 
becomes of the effort, conscience impels him to keep 
up the agitation till the wrong, somehow, is ended. 
Is he, I answer, quite sure that a conscience enlight- 



THE PRESERVATION OF THE UNION. 411 

ened to a comprehension and comparison of all its 
duties impels him to do any such thing? Is he quite 
sure that that Avhich an English or French or Ger- 
man philanthropist might in conscience counsel or 
do, touching this matter of Southern slavery, that 
that also he, the American philanthropist, may, in 
conscience, counsel or do ? Does it go for nothino- in 
his ethics, that he stands, that the ^yhole morality of 
the North stands, in a totally different relation to the 
community of the South from that of the foreign 
propagandist, and that this relation may possibly 
somewhat — ay, to a vast extent — modify all our 
duties ? Instead of hastily inferring that, because 
those States are sister States, you are bound to 
meddle and agitate, and drive pitch-pine knots into 
their flesh and set them on fire, may not the fact that 
they are sister States be the very reason why, though 
others may do so, you may not? In whomsoever 
else these enterprises of an offensive and aggressive 
morality are graceful or safe or right, are you quite 
sure that in you they are either graceful or safe or 
right ? 

I have heard that a great statesman, living in the 
North, but living and thinking for the country, has 
been complained of for saying that we have no more 
to do with slavery in the South, than with slavery in 
Cuba. Are jou. quite sure that the sentiment went 
far enough ? Have we quite as much to do — I mean 
can we wisely or morally assume to do quite as much 
— with Southern as with Cuban slavery? To all 
the rest of the world we are united only by the tie 
of philanthropy, or universal benevolence, and our 
duties to that extent flow from that tie. All that 



412 THE PRESERVATION OF THE UNION. 

such philanthropy prompts us to print or say or do, 
touching slavery in Cuba, we may print, say, or do, II 
for what I know or care, subject, I w^ould recom- 
mend, to the restraints of common sense, and taking 
reasonable thought for our personal security. But 
to America — to our America^ we are united by 
another tie, and may not a principled patriotism, on 
the clearest grounds of moral obligation, limit the 
sphere and control the aspirations and prescribe the 
flights of philanthropy itself? 

In the first place^ remember, I entreat you, that on 
considerations of policy and wisdom — truest policy, 
profoundest wisdom, for the greater good and the 
higher glory of America — for the good of the master 
and slave, now and for all generations — you have 
entered with the Southern States into the most 
sacred and awful and tender of all the relations, — 
the relation of country; and therefore, that 5^ou have, 
expressly and by implication, laid yourselves under 
certain restraints ; you have pledged yourselves to a 
certain measure, and a certain spirit of forbearance ; 
you have shut yourselves out from certain fields and 
highways of philanthropic enterprise — open to you 
before, open to the rest of the world now ; — but 
from which, in order to bestow larger and mightier 
blessings on man^ m another way^ you have agreed to 
retire. 

Yes, we have entered with them into the most 
sacred, salutary, and permanent of the relations of 
social man. AVe have united with them in that 
great master performance of human beings, that one 
work on which the moralists whom I love concur in 
supposing that the Supreme Governor looks down 



I 



THE PRESERVATION OF THE UNION. 413 

with peculiar complacency, the building of a Com- 
monwealth. Finding themselves side by side with 
those States some sixty years ago in this new world, 
thirteen States of us then in all ! thirty-one to-day, 
— touching one another on a thousand points, — 
discerning perfectl}^ that, unless the doom of man was 
to be reversed for them, there was no alternative but 
to become dearest friends or bitterest enemies, — so 
much Thucydides and the historians of the beautiful 
and miserable Italian rejDublics of the Middle Age 
had taught them, — drawn together, also felicitously, 
by a common speech and blood, and the memory of 
their recent labor of glory, — our fathers adopted the 
conclusion that the best interests of humanity, in all 
her forms, demanded that we should enter into the 
grand, sacred, and tender rehitions of country. All 
things demanded it, — the love of man, the hopes of 
liberty, — all things. Hereby, only, can America bless 
herself, and bless the world. 

Consider, in the next place^ that to secure that 
largest good, to create and preserve a country, and 
thus to contribute to the happiness of man as far as 
that grand and vast instrumentality may be made to 
contribute to happiness, it became indispensable to 
take upon themselves, for themselves, and for all the 
generations who should follow, certain engagements 
with those to whom we became united. Some of 
these engagements were express. Such is that for 
the restoration of persons owing service according to 
the law of a State, and flying from it. That is ex- 
press. It is written in this Constitution in terms. It 
was inserted in it, by what passed, sixty years ago, 
for the morality and religion of Massachusetts and 



414 THE PRESERVATION OF THE UNION. 

New England. Yes ; it was written there by men 
who knew their Bible, Old Testament and New, as 
thoroughly, and reverenced it and its Divine Author 
and his Son, the Saviour and Redeemer, as profoundly 
as we. Others of those engagements, and those how 
vast and sacred, were implied. It is not enough to 
say that the Constitution did not give to the new 
nation a particle of power to intermeddle by law 
with slavery within its States, and therefore it has 
no such power. This is true, but not all the truth. 
No man pretends we have power to intermeddle by 
law. But how much more than this is implied in 
the sacred relation of country. It is a marriage of 
more than two, for more than a fleeting natural life. 
" It is to be looked on with other reverence." It is 
an engagement, as between the real parties to it, an 
engagement the most solemn, to love, honor, cherish, 
and keep through all the ages of a nation. It is an 
engagement the most solemn, to cultivate those affec- 
tions that shall lighten and perpetuate a tie which 
ought to last so long. It is an engagement then, 
which limits the sphere, and controls the enterprises 
of philanthropy itself. If you discern that by violat- 
ing the express pledge of the Constitution, and 
refusing to permit the fugitive to be restored ; by 
violating the implied pledges ; by denying the Chris- 
tianity of the holder of slaves ; hj proclaiming him 
impure, cruel, undeserving of affection, trust, and 
regard ; that by this passionate and vehement ag- 
gression upon the prejudices, institutions, and invest- 
ments of a Avhole region — that by all this jou are 
dissolving the ties of country ; endangering its dis- 
ruption ; frustrating the polic}^ on which our fathers 



THE PRESERVATION OF THE UNION. 415 

created it ; and bringing into jeopardy the multiform 
and incalculable good which it was designed to se- 
cure, and would secure, — then, whatever foreign 
philanthropy might do, in such a prospect, — your 
philanthropy is arrested and rebuked by a " higher 
law.*' In this competition of affections. Country, — 
" omnes omnium charitates complect en^^''' the ex:pression, 
the sum total of all things most dearly loved, surely 
holds the first place. 

Will anybody say that these engagements thus 
taken, for these ends, are but " covenants with hell,'' 
which there is no morality and no dignity in keeping? 
From such desperate and shameless fanaticism — if 
such there is — I turn to the moral sentiments of this 
assembly. It is not here — it is not in this hall — the 
blood of Warren in the chair — the form of Washing- 
ton before you — that I will defend the Constitution 
from the charge of being a compact of guilt. I will 
not here defend the Convention which framed it, and 
the Conventions and people which adopted it, from 
the charge of haviilg bought this great blessing of 
country, by immoral promises, more honored in the 
breach than the observance. Thank God, we 3^et 
hold that that transaction was honest, that Avork 
beautiful and pure ; and those engagements, in all 
their length and breadth and height and depth, 
sacred. 

Yet I will say that, if to the formation of such a 
Union it was indispensable, as we know it was, to 
contract these engagements expressed and implied, 
no covenant made by man ever rested on the basis of 
a sounder morali^^^y. They tell us that although you 
have the strict right, according to the writers on 



41G THE rilESERVATION OF THE UNION. 

public law, to whom Mr. Curtis has referred, to re- 
store the fugitive slave to his master, yet that the 
virtue of compassion commands you not to do so. 
But in order to enable ourselves to do all that good, 
and avert all tliat evil — boundless and inappreciable 
both — which we do and avert by the instrumentality 
of a Union under a common government, may we not, 
on the clearest moral principles, agree not to exercise 
compassion in that particular way ? The mere virtue 
of compassion would command you to rescue any 
prisoner. But the citizen, to the end that he may be 
enabled, and others be enabled, to indulge a more 
various and useful compassion in other modes, agrees 
not to indulge it practically in that mode. Is such a 
stipulation immoral ? No more so is this of the Con- 
stitution. 

The}^ tell us that slavery is so wicked a thing, that 
they must pursue it, by agitation, to its home in the 
States ; and that if there is an implied engagement 
to abstain from doing so, it is an engagement to 
neglect an opportunity of doing good, and void in 
the forum of conscience. But was it ever heard of, 
that one may not morally bind himself to abstain 
from what he thinks a particular opportunity of 
doing good? A contract in general restraint of 
philanthropy, or any other useful calling, is void ; 
but a contract to abstain from a specific sphere of 
exertion is not void, and may be Avise and right. 
To entitle himself to instruct heathen children on 
week days, might not a pious missionary engage not 
to attempt to preach to their parents on Sunday? 
To win the opportunity of achieving the mighty 
good summed up in the pregnant language of the 



THE PRESERVATION OF THE UNION. 417 

preamble to the Constitution, such good as man has 
not on this earth been many times permitted to do or 
dream of, we might well surrender the privilege of 
reviling the masters of slaves with whom we must 
"either live or bear no life." 

Will the philanthropist tell you that there is no- 
thing conspicuous enough, and glorious enough for 
him, in thus refraining from this agitation, just be- 
cause our relations to the South, under the Constitu- 
tion, seem to forbid it ? Ay, indeed ! Is it even so? 
Is his morality of so ambitious and mounting a type 
that an effort, by the exercise of love or kindness or 
tolerance, to knit still closer the hearts of a great 
people, and thus to insure ages of peace — of pro- 
gress, of enjoyment — to so vast a mass of the family 
of man, seems too trivial a feat? Oh, how stupen- 
dous a mistake ! What achievement of philanthropy 
bears any proportion to the pure and permanent 
glory of that achievement whereby clusters of con- 
tiguous States, perfectly organized governments in 
themselves every one, full of energy, conscious of 
strength, full of valor, fond of war, — instead of 
growing first jealous, then hostile, — like the tribes 
of Greece after the Persian had retired, — like the 
cities of Italy at the dawn of the modern world, — are 
melted into one, so that for centuries of internal 
peace the grand agencies of amelioration and ad- 
vancement shall operate unimpeded ; the rain and 
dew of Heaven descending on ground better and 
still better prepared to admit them ; the course of 
time — the Providence of God — leading on that 
noiseless progress whose wheels shall turn not back, 
whose consummation shall be in the brightness of 

27 



418 THE PRESERVATION OF THE UNION. 

the latter day. What achievement of man may be 
compared with this achievement ? For the slave, 
alone, what promises half so much? And this is not 
glorious enough for the ambition of philanthropy ! 

No, Fellow-citizens — first of men are the builders 
of empires ! Here it is, my friends, here — right 
here — in doing something in our day and generation 
towards "forming a more perfect Union " — in doing 
something by literature, by public speech, by sound 
industrial policy, by the careful culture of fraternal 
love and regard, by the intercourse of business and 
friendship, by all the means within our command — 
in doing something to leave the Union, when we die, 
stronger than we found it, — here — here is the field 
of our grandest duties and highest rewards. Let the 
grandeur of such duties, let the splendor of siich 
rewards, suffice us. Let them reconcile and constrain 
us to turn from that equivocal philanthropy which 
violates contracts, which tramples on law, which con- 
founds the whole subordination of virtues, which 
counts it a light thing that a nation is rent asunder, 
and the swords of brothers sheathed in the bosoms 
of brothers, if thus the chains of one slave may be 
violently and prematurely broken. 



SPEECH IN FANEUIL HALL. 419 



SPEECH DELIVERED IN FANEUIL HALL. 

OCTOBER 31, 1855. 



I AM gratified, beyond the power of language to 
express, by your kindness. By this thronging audi- 
ence I am even more gratified. In this alone I hope 
I see the doom of the geographical party. It Avould 
have been a thing portentous and mournful, if com- 
mercial Boston had not thus poured itself into this 
Hall, to declare, by its ten thousand voices, against 
the first measure tending practically and with a real 
menace to a separation of the States ever yet pre- 
sented, or certainly in our time presented, to the 
judgment or the passions of the people of America. 
Who should be of the earliest to discern and of the 
wisest to decide the true great question of the day ? 
Did anybody suppose that your intelligence could 
not see what a proposition to organize the people of 
this country into two great geographical parties must 
come to, if successful? Did anybody suppose that, 
seeing this, you would help it on, or fall asleep upon 
it? You, the children of the merchant princes, — 
you, whose profession of commerce and arts give you 
to know and feel, with a sort of professional con- 
sciousness and intensity, our republic to be one, — 
one and undivided ; one and indivisible, let us say, — 



420 SPEECH IN FANEUIL HALL. 

you, whose hearts, abroad, yet untravelled, have 
sometimes leaped up when you have seen the radiant 
flag, burning on the waste sea, along the desolate 
and distant coast, beneath unfamiliar constellations ; 

— and when you have felt your country's great arm 
around you, were you expected to be indifferent 
upon a proposition to rend her into two great rabid 
factions, or to be cheated into a belief that there was 
no such proposition before the country at all ? 

Thank God, this sight dispels both branches of 
this misapprehension. The city is here, all right and 
straight out! Commerce is here! Commerce, in 
whose wants, on whose call, the Union, this Union, 
under this Constitution, began to be ; Commerce 
that rocked the cradle is here, — not to follow the 
hearse, but to keep off the murderer; or, if they 
prefer it, to keep off the doctor ! 

The arts, the industry, of civilization, of intel- 
lect, and of the people, are here ; they to which the 
mines and wheat-fields and cotton-grounds of a boun- 
tiful and common country supply that raw material 
which they give back in shapes of use and taste and 
beauty — they are here ; — they who celebrated the 
establishment of the government by long processions 
of the trades, by music and banners, and thanksgiving 
to God, — singing together as morning stars over the 
rising ball, for the hope of a future of rewarded labor 

— they are here to bear witness, that the prayers of 
the fathers have been graciously heard, and to re- 
member and to guard that instrumentality of constitu- 
tional union, to which, under his goodness, they owe 
all these things. Ay, and the charities, the philan- 
thropy, the humanity, that dwell in these homes and 



SPEECH IN EANEUIL HALL. 421 

hearts, are here to make their protest against the first 
step to moral treason — charities that love all human 
kind ; yet are comprehended all and enfolded in the 
dear name of country, — phiLanthropy and humanity 

— not spasmodic, not savage, not the cold phrase of 
the politician, not hypocritical, not impatient, but 
just, wise, combining, working with — not in spite of 

— the will of the Highest, sowing the seed with 
tears, with trust, and committing the harvest to the 
eternal years of God — these are here. Yes, we are 
all here. We come to ratify the ratification. We 
come to say to our excellent representatives in the 
late Convention, again and again. Well done, good 
and faithful ! We come to engage our hearty sup- 
port and our warmest good wishes for the success of 
the candidates they have nominated, every man of 
them. We come to declare that upon trying our- 
selves by all the approved tests, we are perfectly 
satisfied that we are alive ; that we are glad we are 
alive, since there is work to do worthy of us ; that 
we prefer to remain for the present Whigs ! Consti- 
tutional Whigs ! Massachusetts Whigs ! Faneuil Hall 
Whigs ! Daniel Webster and Henry Clay Whigs ! — 
that we have no new party to choose to-night ; that, 
when we have, we shall choose any other, ay, any 
other, than that which draws the black line of phys- 
ical and social geography across the charmed surface 
of our native land, and finds a republic on one side 
to love, and nothing but an aristocracy to be " ab- 
horred" and "avoided" on the other! Take any 
shape but that ! We come to protest, with all pos- 
sible emphasis and solemnity, against the inaugura- 
tion, as they call it, of the party of the sections. 



422 SPEECH IN FANEUIL HALL. 

We say that for any object wliich constitutional pa- 
triotism can approve, such a party is useless. * We 
say, that for its own avowed objects, if it has an}^ 
specific and definite objects which are constitutional 
and just, it is useless. We say, that if defeated in 
its attempt to get possession of the national govern- 
ment, the mere struggle will insure the triumph of 
that very administration on which it seems to make 
war ; will make the fortune of certain local dealers 
in politics ; will agitate and alienate and tend to put 
asunder whom God hath joined. We hold that if it 
should succeed in that attempt, it would be the most 
terrible of public calamities. I, for one, do not be- 
lieve that this nation could bear it. I am not, it is 
true, quite of the mind of the Senator from Ohio, 
who dared to tell an assembly in Maine, not many 
days since, that there is now no union between us 
and the South ; that the pretended Union is all mere- 
tricious ; that there is no heart in it ; that Russia 
does not hate England, nor England Russia, more 
than the men of the North and the men of the South 
hate each other. The allegation is, I think, yet un- 
true ; the pleasure, the apparent pleasure and exul- 
tation with which he uttered it, is nothing less than 
awful! But yet, when we keep in view, as ever we 
must, the grand and unalterable conditions and pe- 
culiarities of the American national life ; the capital 
fact lying underneath, that we are historically, by 
constitutional law, and to a vast practical extent, a 
mere neighborhood of separate and sovereign States, 
united practically by a written league, or more accu- 
rately, by a government holding only a few great 
powers, and touching a few large objects ; united 



SPEECH IN FANEUIL HALL. 423 

better, perhaps, so far as united at all, by the moral 
ties of" blood and race, a common flag, the memory of 
common dangers, the heritage of a common glory ; — 
united thus, partially by that subtile essence of na- 
tionality, the consciousness of unity, the pride of 
unity, — itself a spirit of recent creation, requiring 
still to be solicited, to be reinforced, to be diffused ; 
having regard to those instrumentalities and influ- 
ences, moral and physical, which encompass us ever 
and endanger us, and especially to the consideration 
that besides the centrifugal tendencies of sovereign 
States, impelling them ever apart, there is a line, — 
a dark, dark line, — almost a fissure in the granite, 
whose imperfect cohesion can scarcely resist the vast 
weight on either side ; — recollecting these things, 
and recollecting, too, how much more than by reason 
or public virtue or their true interests, men are 
moved by anger, pride, and force, in great civil 
crises, — in any way we can survey it, we cannot 
possibly fail to see that the process of forming such an 
organization, and its influence, if completely formed 
and fully in action, would compose a new and disturb- 
ing element in our system, which it is scarcely able 
to encounter, and to which no wise man and genuine 
Unionist would not shudder to see it exposed. 

Why, look at it. Here is a stupendous fabric of 
architecture ; a castle ; a capitol ; suppose the capitol 
at Washington. It is a fortress at once, and a temple. 
The great central dome swells to heaven. It rests 
grandly on its hill by its own weight kept steadfast, 
and seemingly immovable ; Titan hands might have 
built it ; it may stand to see the age of a nation pass 
by. But one imperfection there is ; a seam in the 



424 SPEECH IN FANEUIL HALL. 

marble ; a flaw in the iron ; a break scarce^ visible, 
yet a real vertical fissure, parting by an impercep- 
tible opening from top to foundation the whole in 
two. The builder saw it, and guarded against it as 
well as he might ; those who followed, to repair, with 
pious and skilful hands, tried by underpinning, by lat- 
eral support, by buttress and buttress alternately, to 
hold the disjointed sides in contact. Practically, it 
was becoming less formidable ; the moss was begin- 
ning to conceal it, even ; and here comes a workman 
who proposes to knock out the well-planned lateral 
supports, loosen the underpinning of the ends, dig a, 
yawning excavation under both of them, and then 
set on each the mountain wei2:ht of a frowninor and 
defiant dome of its own. Down the huge pile topples 
in an hour. Small compensation it is that the archi- 
tect of ruin finds his grave, too, beneath it ! 

It is to do what Ave may to scatter this organiza- 
tion in its beginnings that we are here to-night. It 
is for this opportunity, chiefly, that the Whigs of 
Massachusetts are absolutely glad that they are alive. 
True, we seek also to redeem Massachusetts. That 
last legislative year of all sorts of ignorance, and all 
sorts of folly, and all sorts of corruption ; not dignified, 
but made hateful and shameful by a small and mean 
mimicry of treason, withal — we would blot it all out 
from our proud annals for ever. The year which 
deserted Washburn, slighted the counsels of Clifford, 
struck a feeble but malignant blow at the judicial ten- 
ure, nullified a law of the Union, constitutional, if 
the Constitution is constitutional, — we would forget. 
Let it not come into the number of our months. In 
fact, let us talk of something else. 



SPEECH IN FANEUIL HALL. 425 

Yes, Whigs of Boston and Massachusetts ! We 
strike at higher game. It is because the experiment 
is now making, whether a sectional party, merging 
and overriding all others, is possible ; whether candi- 
dates for the presidency shall openly electioneer for 
that office, hy advocating the formation of such a 
party, and not see the mantling cup of honors, to 
which they are reaching, dashed to their feet by the 
indignation of the whole country — it is because this 
experiment is making to-day, that we feel that we 
have a duty to do. Who of us knows that it is not 
his last civil labor ? Who of us does not feel that if 
it were so, our noblest labor were our last ? Were it 
even so, what signifies it whether we personally and 
politically sink or swim — live or die — survive or 
perish ! Would not that be a bright page wherein 
the historian, after having recorded in the former 
chapters of his book the long antecedents of the 
Whigs, — that they held the government of this good 
old State, with small exception, for a quarter of a 
century ; that they held it long enough to embody 
their politics in official state papers ; on the statute 
book ; in public speech ; through their accredited 
press ; in the prevailing tone and maxims of public life ; 
long enough to see those politics bear rich, practical, 
autumnal fruits ; that while they held power, popular 
education was improved ; the instrumentalities of in- 
tercourse of all parts of the State with each other, 
and with the States beyond, were multiplied and 
perfected, and the universal industrial prosperity of 
the people advanced by the reforming hand, reform- 
ing wisely ; that the sentiment of obedience to law, 
popular or unpopular, while law, of observance of 



426 SPEECH IN FANEUIL HALL. 

order, of the supremacy of the national Constitution, 
within its limits over the State, and of the State con- 
stitution over the legislature ; of the practicability 
and tlie necessity of reconciling and performing all 
political duties, not one, nor half, but all^ — that this 
sentiment was taught and was practised ; that liberty 
of conscience was held sacred ; that the right to be 
represented equally in the government of the State 
was recognized, and sought to be retained in the Con- 
stitution as belonging to every human being, because 
such, inhabiting her soil ; that they held even good 
laws powerless, and a government of laws impossible, 
if not interpreted and administered by judges as im- 
partial as the lot of humanity will admit, and helped 
to be so by the tenure of independence of the ebb and 
flow of party ; that although ever they boasted to be 
a branch of a national Whig connection, and as such 
held a creed of national politics, combining a policy 
of peace with honor, industry protected by wise dis- 
crimination, improvement of the great natural agen- 
cies of intercourse, a provident and liberal and states- 
manlike administration of the pubhc domain, — a 
creed on which wise and good men of every State, in 
large numbers, sometimes by large majorities, were 
with them ; although they held this creed of union, 
they yet left themselves wholly free to cherish and 
act on the local sentiment of slavery; that they 
opposed its extension by their press, by their vote, by 
public debate — its extension by annexation of Texas 
and Cuba, and by repeal of the compromise, and that 
their greatest and best, all who represented them, did 
so ever up to the limits of the Constitution and an hon- 
est statesmanship, and paused reverentially there ; — 



I 



SPEECH IN FANEUIL HALL. 427 

would it not be a glorious page on which, after con- 
cluding this detail, he should record that their last 
organic act was to meet the dark wave of this tide of 
sectionalism on the strand, breast high, and roll it 
back upon its depths ; ay, or to be buried under it ! 
Would not that be higher than to follow the advice 
of one, once of us, who counsels the Whigs to march 
out of the field with all the honors ? Yes, we 
reject the Avord of command. We will not march 
out of the field at all. We will stand just where we 
are, and defend those honors and add to them. Per- 
haps we may fall. That were better than the flight 
he advises; to fall, and let our recorded honors 
thicken on our graves. That were better than flight ; 
but who can tell that there are not others higher to 
be won yet ? Laurels farther up ; more precious — 
less perishing ; to be won by more heroic civil duty, 
and the austerer glory of more self-sacrifice. Be 
these ungathered laurels ours to reap ! 

But it occurs to me, that I have been a little too 
fast in assuming that your minds are already all made 
up not to join this geographical party. Let us then 
pause, and inspect the thing a little. Let us do it 
under a threefold dissection. See then, first, exactly 
what it is to be ; what, if completely formed, it is to 
be. Second, what good it will do. And, third, what 
evil it will do ; what evil the process of forming it 
will do ; what evil it will do after it is formed. First, 
what is it to be, when formed ? Exactly an organiza- 
tion of all the people of the free States, if they can 
get all, if not, majorities of all, into a political party 
proper, to oppose the whole people of all the slave 
States, organized into just such another association 



428 SPEECH IN FANEUIL HALL. 

upon the single, but broad and fertile topic of slavery. 
Into this organization, on one side and the other, eveiy 
other party is, if possible, to be merged ; certainly by 
this one, every other is to be out-voted and vanquished. 
This promising and happy consummation, mark you, 
is to be a political party proper. It is not to be a 
public opinion on slavery. It is not to be a public 
opinion against slavery. It is not to be a mere uni- 
versal personal conviction of every man which he may 
carry with him into all his political duties and rela- 
tions, and bind up with his Democratic opinions, or 
Whig opinions, or Native American opinions ; — that 
is not it, at all. It is to be, and act, as a political 
party properly, technically, and with tremendous em- 
phasis so called. It is to fill office, make laws, gov- 
ern great States, govern the nation ; and to do this 
by the one single test of what is called opposition to 
slavery ; on the one single impulse of hate and dread 
of the aristocracy of the South, by which slavery is 
maintained. To carry out this opposition, to breathe 
forth this hate, and this dread in action, it lives ; 
it holds its conventions, supports its press, selects its 
candidates, prescribes their creed, conducts its elec- 
tioneering, and directs every act that it does and 
every word that it speaks. And now, when you con- 
sider how prodigious an agency in a republic a flushed 
and powerful party is at the best ; when you remem- 
ber what it has done to shame and scare away liberty 
from her loved haunts and home by the blue jEgean, 
or beneath the sunny skies of Italy ; when you con- 
sider how party, as the general fact, is sure to form 
and guide that public opinion which rules the world ; 
how it grows to be "the madness of the many for the 



SPEECH IN FANEUIL HALL. 429 

benefit of the few ; " when you consider that to win 
or retain the general voice, all the ability this organi- 
zation can possibly command will be enlisted and 
paid ; that it will offer office to the ambitious, sj^oils 
to the greedy, the dear, delicious indulgence of his 
one single idea to the zealot, strong in faith, fierce 
and narrow in his creed ; to the sentimentalist and 
litterateur^ the corrupting praise of a foreign press ; to 
a distempered and unmeaning pliilanthropy, the cure 
of one evil by the creation of ten thousand ; meditat- 
ing on these things, you attain to some conception 
of what this party is to be. 

And now what good is it to do ? And, first, what 
on earth is it going to do, anyhow ? It is formed, we 
will say. It has triumphed. It has got power in the 
free States. It has got the general government. It 
has chosen its president. It has got a majority in 
both houses of congress. The minority are a body of 
representatives of slaveholders. And tliey have met 
in the great chambers. What to do? Now, it is 
agreed, on all hands, that in regard to what they are 
to do as a party, on any subject, human or divine, out- 
side of slavery^ we know no more than if they were so 
many men let down in so many baskets from the clouds. 
As a party, — and they gained power as a party, they 
are to rule us as a party; — but as a party they 
solemnly adjure that they hold no opinion on any 
thing whatever, on any thing but slavery. They 
spread their arms wide open to every humor of the 
human mind ; to all the forms of sense and nonsense ; 
to more irreconcilable and belligerent tempers and 
politics than ever quarrelled in a menagerie ; to men 
of war and men of peace ; to the friend of annexation, 



430 SPEECH IN FANEUIL HALL. 

if he can find free soil to annex, as you may, in 
Canada, and the enemy of any more area ; to protec- 
tionists and free traders ; men of strict-, and men of 
large construction, and men of no construction at all ; 
temperance men and anti-temperance men ; the advo- 
cate of ten hours of labor, the advocate of twelve, — 
in short, they make a general bid for every opinion 
on every thing, with the pledge of the party to each 
and all, that if they will roar with a common consent, 
and make a satisfactory hullalaloo on slavery, every 
man of them shall have a fair chance, and no privi- 
lege, and everj'body may enact every thing, if he 
can. 

And now, in the name of all common sense, in the 
whole history of elective government, was a free peo- 
ple ever called on to commit power, the whole vast 
enginery, the whole thunder of the State, to such a 
ruler as this ! Slavery, they do say, they will oppose, 
right and left ; but what other one maxim of govern- 
ment they will adopt, state or national ; what one 
law, on what one subject, they wall pass ; what one 
institution, or one policy of the fathers they will 
spare ; what one sentiment they will inculcate ; what 
one glory they will j)rize ; what of all that government 
can cause or cure, they will cause or cure or tr}^ to 
— we have no more to guide us than if they were an 
encampment of a race never seen before, poured by 
some populous and unknown North, from her frozen 
loins I How mad, how contemptible to deliver our- 
selves over to such a veiled enthusiast as this ! Bet- 
ter the urn and the lot of Solon — better the fantastic 
chances of hereditary descent, a thousand-fold. 

Well, on their one single specialty of slavery, what 



SPEECH IN FANEUIL HALL. 431 

are they going to do ? And I say that we have not 
one particle more of evidence what specific thing, or 
what thing in general the}^ mean to do on slavery, than 
on any thing else. I do say this, however, that those 
honest men, who, in the simplicity of their hearts, 
have sympathized with this new party in the hope of 
having the Missouri Compromise restored, have not 
one particle of assurance that they would do it if they 
could ; or that, if they could, they would rest there, or 
within half the globe of it. Loud they are in their 
reprobation of the repeal. So are we all ! But is 
it a restoration they seek? No, nothing so little. 
When, a few daj's ago, a respectable Whig gentle- 
man presented himself at one of their meetings, and 
being invited to speak, began by saying that they 
were all there to unite for the repeal of the repeal, 
they hissed him incontinentl3\ Less discourteously in 
the manner of it, quite as unequivocally they have 
set forth in terms the most explicit, in the address of 
their convention, that the restoration of the Compro- 
mise of 1820 is not what they desire. What are they 
to do, then, if they win power ? Either nothing at all 
which Whigs could not do, and would not do, if a 
wise and large statesmanship permit it ; or they bring 
on a conflict which separates the States. Nothing 
at all which we would not do, if our fidelity to the 
Constitution would allow us, or that which under the 
Constitution cannot be done. Nothing at all, or just 
what their agitation from 1835 to this hour, has ac- 
complished, — rivet the iron chains of the slave, 
loose the golden bands of the Union. So much for 
the good it will do. 

But now survey the evil it would do. We cannot, 



432 SrEECll IN FANEUIL HALL. 

of course, foreknow exactly what it would do, if it 
could, nor how much, exactly, it could do, if it would. 
We cannot know, in other words, exactly where or 
when or how, if it attained the whole power that it 
seeks, it would bring on the final strife. But one 
thing we know, that they cannot, by possibility, go 
through the process of merely and completely organiz- 
ing such a party but by elaborately and carefully train- 
ing the men on this side of tlieir line to " abhor " and 
" avoid " the men on the other. The basis of the or- 
ganization is reciprocal sectional hate. This is the 
sentiment at bottom. This, and nothing else. To 
form and heighten this ; to fortify and justify it ; to 
show that it is moral and necessary and brave, the 
whole vast enginery of party tactics is to be put in 
request. If the ingenuity of hell were tasked for a 
device to alienate and rend asunder our immature 
and artificial nationality, it could devise nothing so 
effectual ! 

I take my stand here ! I resist and deprecate the 
mere attempt to form the party. I don't expect to live 
to see it succeed in its grasp at power. I am sure I hope 
I shall not, but I see the attempt making. I think I 
see the dreadful influence of such an attempt. That 
influence I would expose. Woe ! woe ! to the sower 
of such seed as this ! It may perish where it falls. 
The God of our fathers may withhold tlie early and 
latter rain and the dew, and the grain may die ; but 
woe to the hand that dares to scatter it. 

Painful it is to see some of whom a higher hope 
might have been cherished, on motives and with views 
I dare say satisfactory to themselves, giving aid and 
comfort to such a thing. In looking anxiously out of 



SPEECH IN FANEUIL HALL. 433 

my own absolute retirement from every form of pub- 
lic life, to observe how the movers of this new party 
mean to urge it upon the people, what topics they 
mean to employ, what aims they mean to propose, 
and, above all, what tone and spirit they mean to 
breathe and spread, and what influence to exert on 
the sectional passions or the national sentiments of 
our country — I have had occasion to read something 
of their spoken and written exhortations — this in- 
auguration eloquence of sectionalism — and think I 
comprehend it. And what work do they make of it? 
Yes — wdiat? With what impression of your coun- 
try, your whole country — that is the true test of a 
party platform and a party appeal — do you rise from 
listening to the preachers of this new faith ? What 
lesson of duty to all, and of the claims of all, and of 
love to all, has it taught you? Does not our America 
seem to lose her form, her color, her vesture, as you 
read? Does not the magic of the metamorphosis 
come on her ? 

" Her spirits faint, 
Her blooming cheeks assume a pallid teint, 
And scarce her form remains." 

Does it not seem as if one half of the map were 
blotted out or rolled up for ever from your eye ? Are 
you not looking with perplexity and pain, your spirits 
as in a dream all bound up, upon a different, another, 
and a smaller native land? Where do you find in 
this body of discourse one single recollection that 
North and South compose a common country, to 
which our most pious affections are due, and our 
wdiole service engaged? Where, beneath this logic 
and this rhetoric of sectionalism, do you feel one 

28 



434 SPEECH IN FANEUIL HALL. 

throb of a heart capacious of our whole America? 
The deep, full, burning tide of American feeling, so 
hard to counterfeit, so hard to chill, does it once glad- 
den and glorify this inauguration oratory and these 
inauguration ceremonies? Is not the key-note of it 
all, that the slaveholders of the South are an aristoc- 
racy to be ^' abliorred " and " avoided ; " that they are 
insidious and dangerous ; that they are undermining 
our republic, and are at all hazards to be resisted? 
Do they not inaugurate the new party on the basis pf 
reciprocal hate and reciprocal fear of section to sec- 
tion? Hear the sharp and stern logic of one of these 
orators : — " Aristocracy, through all hazards, is to be 
abhorred and avoided. But a privileged class are 
sure to become, nay, are, an aristocracy already. The 
local Southern law, and the national Constitution, 
make the slaveholders a privileged class. They are, 
therefore, an aristocracy to be abhorred and avoided.'' 
Such is the piercing key-note of his speech. To this 
he sets his whole music of discord. To this he would 
set the whole music of the next presidential canvass. 
To this, the tens of thousands of the free States are 
to march. " Abhor " and " avoid " the aristocracy of 
tlie South! Organize to do it the better! They are 
insidious and dangerous. They are undermining re- 
publican liberty. March to defend it ! Ay, march, 
were it over the burning marl, or by the light which 
the tossing wave of the lake casts pale- and dreadful. 

" I might show," the same orator proceeds, " that 
the Constitution is wrong in thus conceding to a 
privileged class. I might show, a priori, that such 
a class would be dangerous. I choose rather to teach 
you so to read the history of America, that you shall 



SPEECH m FANEUIL HALL. 435 

iind its one great lesson will be hatred and dread of 
the aristocracy of the South, for its conduct even 
more than for its privileges." And so he unrolls the 
map, and opens the record. He traces the miracu- 
lous story ; he traces the miraculous growth from the 
birthday of the Constitution, and from the straitened 
margin of the old thirteen States, through all the 
series of expansion, — the acquisition of Louisiana, 
and the adoption of that State into the Union ; the 
successive adoption, also, of Kentucky, Tennessee, 
Mississi])pi, Alabama, and Missouri; the annexation 
of Florida and Texas and California, — a growth 
in fifty years, from a narrow heritage between the 
Atlantic and Alleghany, and the spring-heads of the 
Connecticut and the mouth of the St. Mary's in 
Georgia, to the dimensions of Roman, of Russian, of 
Asiatic boundlessness, — this he traces across the Alle- 
ghanies, across the imperial valley and the Father 
of Rivers, through the opened portals of the Rocky 
Mountains to the shores of the great tranquil sea — 
ay, and beyond these shores to richer dominion over 
the commerce of the East, to which it opens a new and 
nearer way — this majestic series, our glory, our shame, 
he runs over ; and the one single lesson he gathers and 
preaches from it is, that the aristocracy of the South is 
as insidious and dangerous and undermining in practice 
as it is threatening a priori; that we should " abhor " 
and " avoid " it, for what it has done, as well as for 
what the Constitution and the laws secure to it. 
This is the lesson of the History of America. As he 
studies the map and reads the history, so is the new 
party to do it ; so are the fathers, and so are the 
children of the free States all to read it ; it is to 



436 SPEECH m FANEUIL HALL. 

teach them all one dull lesson, and to sound in their 
ears one single, dreary, and monotonous warning. 
The annexation of Louisiana, the master-work of 
Jefferson, unless you say the Declaration of Inde- 
pendence is his master-worlv ; the annexation of 
Florida, by treaty, for which John Quincy Adams 
acquired so just a fame, and which stipulates for the 
incorporation of its inhabitants into the Union ; the 
victories of Palo Alto, Monterey, Buena Vista, and 
Contreras, which crowned the arms of America with 
a lustre imperishable, although they could not vindi- 
cate, to justice and history, the administration or the 
politics which brought on the war, nor the Free 
Soilers of New York, whose tactics caused the elec- 
tion of that administration ; this expansion, so stu- 
pendous — this motion, silent and resistless, of all 
the currents of national beincr towards the settino^ 
sun — like that of our astronomical system itself, 
towards the distant constellation ; this all is to kin- 
dle no emotion, to inspire no duty, to inculcate no 
truth, but to " abhor " and " avoid" the aristocracy, 
whose rapacious use or insidious fabrication of oppor- 
tunity so strikingly illustrates the folly of the Con- 
stitution. 

Oh ! how soothing and elevating to turn from this 
to the meridian brightness, the descending orb, the 
whole clear clay, of our immortal Webster: How 
sweet, how instructive to hang again on the lips now 
mute, still speaking, whose eloquence, whose wisdom, 
were all given ever to his whole America ! How 
grand to feel again the beat of the great heart which 
could enfold us all ! He saw, too, and he deplored 
the spread of slavery. He marked, and he resisted 



I 



SPEECH IN FANEUIL HALL. 437 

the frenzy of the politics by which the then adminis- 
tration gave it so vast an impulse by annexing Texas 
and making war with Mexico. He had survej^ed — 
no man had so deeply done it — the growth of his 
country from the rock of Pl3-mouth and the peninsula 
of Jamestown to the western sea. But did he think it 
just to trace it all to the aggressive spirit of the aris- 
tocracy who hold slaves? Could his balanced and 
gigantic intelligence and his genuine patriotism have 
been brought to believe and to teach that the single 
desire to find a new field for slavery to till, has in 
fifty years transformed a strip of sea-coast into a 
national domain larger than Europe ? 

Is nothing to be ascribed to the necessities of na- 
tional situation and the opportunities of national 
glory ; nothing to the sober, collective judgment of 
the people of all the sections ; nothing to the fore- 
sight of some great men — like Jefferson and John 
Quincy Adams — who loved not slavery, nor the 
expansion of the area of slavery, but who did love 
their country dearly and wisely, and knew that that 
evil would be more than compensated by the exceed- 
ing good ; nothing to a diffused, vehement national- 
ity, brave, ambitious, conscious of a mighty strength, 
burning to tr}^ itself against the resistance of foreign 
contact, and finding on its AVest and South-west 
border no equal force to hold it back ; nothing to the 
blindness of mere party tactics and the power of a 
popular administration ; nothing to the love of glory, 
' and contention, and danger which fiames and revels 
in the adolescent national heart ? Is it all mere and 
sheer negro-breeding and negro-selling that has done 
this? More. Is nothing^ to be ascribed to the in- 



438 SPEECH IN FANEUIL HALL. 

fluence of Northern aggression against slavery, pro- 
voking by an eternal law a Southern rally for its 
defence and propagation ? Have these great readers 
of our history forgotten that as far back as 1805, as 
1801, the press, some influential portions of the press 
of a large political party at the North, began to 
denounce the election and reelection of Jefterson as a 
triumph of the slave power ; the acquisition of Louisi- 
ana, that absolute necessity of our peace, how much 
more of our greatness, as another triumph of the 
slave power ; that this form of sectionalism already 
assailed the slave representation of the Constitution, 
and tried to strike it out ; that it bore its part, a 
large part, inflaming New England to the measure 
of the Hartford Convention ; that, hushed to silence 
by the fervid flood of nationality which swept the 
country at the close of a war, breathing into us the 
full first inspiration of American life, it awoke again 
on the application of Missouri for admission ; that, 
silenced once more by that adjustment, a few years 
later it took on the more virulent type of abolition- 
ism ; and from that moment, helped on by the general 
progress of the age, it has never ceased for an hour 
to make war on the institutions of the South, to as- 
sail the motives, and arraign the conscience of the 
slave-holder; to teach to "abhor" and to "avoid" 
him, and denounce the Union as a compact with hell? 
Is it not possible that a part of what they call the 
aggressive spirit of slavery may be reaction against 
our own aggression? May it not be, that in this 
recrimination of the sections, and in the judgment 
of history, there may be blows to take as well as 
blows to give ? That great man whose name I have 



SIEECH IN FANEUIL HALL. 439 

spoken, could see, and he dared to admit, the errors 
of both sections. In those errors, in this very hate 
and this very dread which the new party would 
organize, he saw the supreme danger of his country. 
To correct those errors, to allay that dread, to turn 
that liate to love, was the sublime aim of his last and 
noblest labor. " I am looking out," he said, " not 
for my own security or safety, for I am looking out 
for no fragment on which to float away from the 
wreck, if wreck there must be, but for the good of 
the whole, and the preservation of all. I speak to- 
day for the Union ! Hear me, for my cause ! " He 
could not have abandoned himself, he never saw an 
hour in which he could have any more abandoned 
himself to this gloomy enterprise of sectionalism, 
than Washington could have clone it, stooping from 
the pathos and grandeur and parental love of the 
Farewell Address ; than the leader of Israel could 
have done it, as he stood in that last hour on Pisgah 
and surveyed in vision the wide-spread tents of the 
kindred tribes, rejoicing together in the peace and in 
the light of their nation's God. O, for an hour of 
such a life, and all were not yet lost. 



440 SPEECH AT LOWELL. 



SPEECH "ON THE POLITICAL TOPICS NOW 
PROMINENT BEFORE THE COUNTRY." 

DELIVERED AT LOWELL, MASS., OCTOBER 28, 1856. 



I HAVE accepted your invitation to this hall with 
pleasure, — although it is pleasure not unattended by 
pain. 

To meet you, Fellow-citizens of Lowell and of 
Middlesex, between whom, the larger number of 
whom, and myself, I may hope, from the terms of 
the call under which you assemble, there is some 
sympathy of oj)inion and feeling on the ''political 
topics now prominent before the community;" to 
meet and confer, however briefly and imperfectly, 
on the condition of our country, and the duties of 
those who aspire only to be good citizens, and are 
inquiring anxiously what in that humble yet respon- 
sible character they have to do — to meet thus, and 
here — not as politicians, not as partisans, not as 
time-servers, not as office-seekers, not as followers 
of a multitude because it is a multitude, not as 
sectionalists, but as sons and daughters of our united 
and inherited America ; who love her, filially and 
fervently for herself; our own — the beautiful, the 
endeared, the bounteous ; the imperial and general 
Parent ! — and whose hearts' desire and prayer to 



SPEECH AT LOWELL. 441 

God is only to know how we shall serve her best, — 
this is a pleasure and a privilege for which I shall be 
very long and ver}^ deeply in your debt. 

And this pleasure, there is here and now nothing 
to allo}^ Differing as we have done, some of us, 
through half our lives ; differing as now we do, and 
shall hereafter do, on means, on details, on causes of 
the evil, on men, on non-essentials — non-essentials I 
would say in so far as the demands of these most 
rugged and eventful times are concerned — I think 
that on the question, what is the true issue before us 
and the capital danger we have to meet ; on this, and 
on all the larger ideas, in all the nobler emotions 
which ought to swell the heart and guide the votes 
of true men to-day — through this one sharp and 
dark hour we sliall stand together, shoulder to shoul- 
der, though we have never done so before, and may 
never do so again. 

I infer this from the language of your invitation. 
The welcome with which you have met me allows 
me to expect so much. The place we meet in gives 
assurance of it. 

If there is one spot of New England earth rather 
than another, on whose ear that strange music of 
discords to which they are rallying the files — a little 
scattered and a little flinching, thank God ! — of 
their Geographical party — must fall like a fire-bell 
in the night, it is here ; it is in Middlesex ; it is in 
Lowell ! 

If this attempt at combining States against States 
for the possession of the government has no danger 
in it for anybody, well and good. Let all then sleep 
on, and take their rest. If it has danger for anybody, 



442 SPEECH AT LOWELL. 

for you, Fellow-citizens of Lowell, more than for any 
of New England or as much, it has that clanger. 
Who needs the Union, if you do not ? Who should 
have brain and heart enough to comprehend and 
employ the means of keeping it, if not you ? Others 
may be Unionists by chance ; by fits and starts ; on 
the lips ; Unionists when nothing more exciting, or 
more show}^, or more profitable, casts up. You are 
Unionists by profession ; Unionists by necessity ; 
Unionists always. Others may find Vermont, or 
Massachusetts, or New Hampshire, or Rhode Island, 
large enough for them. You need the wdiole United 
Continent over which the flag waves to-day, and you 
need it governed, within the limits of the actual 
Constitution, by one supreme will. To secure that 
vast and that indispensable market at home ; to com- 
mand in the least degree a steady, uniform, or even 
occasional protection against the redundant capital, 
matured skill, pauper labor, and ebbing and falling 
prices of the Old World at peace ; to enable the 
looms of America to clothe the teeming millions of 
America, — you need a regulation of commerce, uni- 
form, one, the work of one united mind, which shall 
draw along our illimitable coast of sea and lake, 
between the universal American race on one side, 
and all the rest of mankind on the other, a line, not 
of seclusion, not of prohibition, but a line of security, 
and discrimination — discrimination between the raw 
material at least and the competing product — a line 
of social and industrial boundary behind which our 
infancy may grow to manhood ; our weakness to 
strength ; our " 'prentice hand " to that skill which 
shall hang out the lamp of beauty on the high places 
of our wealth, and our power, and our liberty ! 



SPEECH AT LOWELL. 443 

Yes, this yon need ; and you know how, and where, 
you can have it. 

How perfectly our springing and yet immature 
manufacturing and mechanical interests in 1788 dis- 
cerned this need, and with what deep, reasonable, 
passionate enthusiasm they celebrated the adoption 
of the Constitution which held out the promise of 
meeting it ! I know very well that all good men ; all 
far-seeing men ; all large-brained and large-hearted 
men were giacl that day. I recall that grand and 
exultant exclamation of one of them : " It is done ; 
we have become a nation." But even then it seemed 
to some, more than to others, the dawn of a day of 
good things to come. If you turn to that procession 
and that pageant of industry, in Philadelphia, on the 
4th of July, 1788, — that grand and affecting dra- 
matic action throngh which, on that magnificent stage 
as in a theatre, there were represented the sublime 
joy, and the sublime hopes with which the bosom of 
Pennsylvania was throbbing, — then and thus I think 
you seem to see, that while the Constitution promised 
glory and happiness to all our America, it was to 
the labor of America the very breath of life. We 
hear it said that it was for trade — foreign and 
domestic, largely — that the new and more perfect 
union was formed, and that is true. Very fit it was 
that in that gorgeous day of national emblems, the 
silver Delaware should have shown forth prominently 
— decorative and festive — to announce and welcome 
from all her mast-heads the rising orb of American 
commerce. Yet was there one piece in the perform- 
ance opening a still wider glimpse of its immense 
utilities and touching the heart with a finer emotion. 



444 SPEECH AT LOWELL. 

That large "stage borne on the carriage of the 
Manufacturing Society, tliirty feet in length, on 
which carding machines, and spinning machines, and 
weaving machines were displaying the various manu- 
facture of cotton, was viewed," says an e3'e-witness, 
" with astonishment and delight by every spectator." 
*' On that stage was carried the emblem of the future 
wealth and independence of our country." In that 
precious form of industry in which the harvest of 
Southern suns and the labor of Northern hands and 
brains may meet to produce a fabric for all nations to 
put on, — the industry of reason, and of the people, 
— "in that," says he, "is a bond of union more 
powerful than any one clause of the Constitution." 
In the motto on that carriage, " May the Union gov- 
ernment protect the manufactures of America," read 
the hopes and the necessities of this labor. Such still 
is your praj^er ; such your right ; as with the fathers 
so with the children ! May that same Pennsylvania 
which so celebrated the adoption of the Constitution 
perpetuate it to-day! Wheresoever else the earth 
may shake, and the keepers and pillars of the house 
ma}^ tremble and bow themselves, let the keystone of 
the national arch, intrusted to hold it against the sky, 
stand fast in its place of strength and beauty for ever ! 
Pardon me if I have seemed to find in the mere 
interesU of Lowell a reason why, if there is a danger, 
you should be the first to discern and first to meet it. 
I turn from the interests of Lowell to the memories of 
Middlesex ; and I find in them at least assurance that 
if there is a danger, your eye will see it and your ear 
catch it as far and as quick as the old Minute-men 
saw the midnight signals in the belfrys, and caught 



I 



SPEECH AT LOWELL. 445 

the low midnight drum-beat. Surely, surely, that 
immortal boast of Webster will be yours, " Where 
American liberty raised its first voice, and where its 
youth was nurtured and sustained, there it still lives, 
in the strength of its manhood and full of its original 
spirit. If discord and disunion shall wound it, if 
party strife and blind ambition shall hawk at and 
tear it, if folly and madness, if uneasiness under 
salutary and necessary restraint, shall succeed in 
separating it from the Union — by which alone its 
existence is made sure — it will stand, in the end, by 
the side of that cradle in which its infanc}^ was 
rocked ; it will stretch forth its arm with whatever 
of vigor it may still retain over the friends who 
gather around it ; and it will fall at last, if fall it 
must, amidst the proudest monuments of its own 
glory, and on the very spot of its origin." Yes, it 
was here, that the American people began to be, and 
the American nation was born in a day. There, on 
the 19th of April ; there, on the ITth of June ; on 
that narrow green ; bej^ond that little bridge ; on 
those heights of glory ; there, — even as the cloud of 
battle parted and the blood of your fathers was 
sinkincr into the cyround — the form and faces of the 
old thirteen colonies passed away, and the young 
Republic lifted his forehead from the " baptism of 
fire ; " the old provincial flags were rolled up and 
disappeared as a scroll, and the radiant banner by 
which the United America is known, and shall be, for 
a thousand years of history, known to all the world 
as one, was handed down from the sky. Here at 
least shall not the dismemberment of that nation 
begin. Here at least the first star shall not be erased 
from that banner ! 



446 SPEECH AT LOWELL. 

No, Fellow-citizens of Middlesex. They may per- 
suade you that there is no danger in what they are 
doing ; they may persuade you that a combination of 
sixteen States to wrest the possession of the govern- 
ment from the other fifteen is all right, all safe, and 
all necessary. But if they fail in this ; if they fail to 
show that Avhatever they wish or mean to do, they 
are not subjecting the Union of America, and the 
peace and honor of America, to a trial which may ex- 
ceed its strength, then tell them they had better try 
that case in some other county. Tell them that while 
the summit of that monument catches the rays of the 
rising and descending sun, and the returning or de- 
parting sailor greets it from his mast-head, it shall 
stand the colossal image of a tvhole country ; and the 
flag that floats from it to-day shall float there while 
the earth bears a plant, or the sea rolls a wave ! 

I meet you for these reasons wdth pleasure. But 
I said and feel that that pleasure is attended close 
by pain. Some of you will partake of that with me 
also. All w^ill comprehend it. I do not disguise that 
I look on the occasion with too anxious an interest, 
with too many fond memories of the past, with too keen 
a sense of the contrast of the present with the past, 
with too much thought of the possible future, for 
unmixed pleasure even here. I will not call this 
presidential election in advance a peril or a crisis, for 
that might be to beg the question, but I will venture 
in advance to say, that the best wdsh a patriot could 
make for liis country is that she may never undergo 
such another. Tlie first desire of my heart, at least, 
is that I may never see such another. To this de- 
sire, personal considerations do not at all contribute. 



SPEECH AT LOWELL. 447 

I should be ashamed of myself if they did, although I 
cannot but wonder at that discriminating injustice 
and insolence of dictation which claims freedom of 
thought and purity of motive for itself, and allows 
them to others, and denies them to me. But this is 
nothing. Is there no one here who shares with me 
the wish, that his country, that himself, might nev^er 
see another such a crisis as this? Is there no one 
here, — are there not hundreds here, — who, recall- 
ing the presidential elections they have assisted in, 
and contrasting their safe and their noble stimula- 
tions ; their sublime moments ; their admirable in- 
fluences, as a training to a closer union, and a truer 
and intenser American feeling and life, with this 
one ; does not confess some anxiety, some bewilder- 
ment, some loathing, some fear? Those generous, 
animated, fraternal contendings of the American 
people for a choice of the successor of Washington ; 
conducted in the name and under the control of two 
great parties ; running, both of them, through and 
through the Union, into every State and every vici- 
nage, every congressional district, and every school 
district, and every parish ; and binding Texas to 
Maine, Georgia to New Hampshire, Missouri to Mas- 
sachusetts, by a new, artificial, and vehement cohe- 
sion, — a tie, not mystic, by which you greeted, 
every man greeted, a brother and an ally, " idem sen- 
tientem de repuhlica ; " everywhere that careful, just, 
and constitutional recognition on every party banner ; 
by every party creed and code ; in every party speech, 
and song, and procession of torchlight, — the recogni- 
tion of an equal title to love, regard, honor, equality, 
in each and every state and region; that studious 



448 SPEECH AT LOWELL. 

and that admirable exclusion of all things sectional ; 
all things wliich supposed the existence of a conflict 
of sections ; all opinions, all theories of policy, all 
enterprises of philanthropy, all aims of all sorts in 
which his geographical and social position could 
prevent any one American from sharing alike ; those 
platforms, broad as our continent ; equal as our Con- 
stitution ; comprehensive as our liberty ; those mighty 
minglings of minds and hearts, in which Webster could 
address Virginians in the Capitol Square at Richmond, 
and Berrien and Bell and Leigh and Johnson could feel 
and heighten the inspiration of Faneuil Hall and Bun- 
ker Hill, — all everywhere at home ; — those presiden- 
tial contests which left our Union stronger, our mutual 
acquaintance and respect closer and deeper, our coun- 
try a dearer and fairer and grander ideal, hastening 
forward the growth of our nationality almost as much 
as a foreign war, without its blood, its crime, and its 
cost, — is there no one, are there not hundreds here, 
who recall and regret them ? Contrasted with them 
and their day, does not this one, and this time, seem 
more a dream than a reality? Can we avoid the 
vain wish that it was only and all a dream ? Does 
this attempt to weave and plait the two North wings 
of the old national parties into a single Northern one, 
and cut the Southern wing off altogether, strike you 
to be quite as far-sighted and safe as it is new and 
bold? In the temporary and local success which 
seemed a little while ago to attend it here, and 
which led certain small editors, little speakers on 
low stumps, writers of bad novels and forgotten 
poems, preachers of Pantheism and revilers of Jef- 
ferson, and excellent gentlemen, so moral and re- 



I 



SPEECH AT LOWELL. 449 

ligions that they could not rejoice at their country's 
victories over England, — led these people to sup- 
pose they had all at once become your masters and 
mine ; in that temporary and local success did you 
see nothing but rose colors and the dawn of the Mil- 
lennium? To combine States against States, in such 
a system as ours, has it been generally held a very 
happy device towards forming a more i)ei'f^ct union 
and insuring domestic tranquillity? To combine 
them thus against each other geographically, to take 
the whole vast range of the free States, lying to- 
gether, sixteen out of thirty-one, seventeen millions 
out of five or six and twenty millions, — the most 
populous, the strongest, the most advancing, — and 
form them in battalion against the fewer numbers 
and slower growth, and waning relative power on 
the other side ; to bring this sectional majority under 
party drill and stimidus of pay and rations ; to offer 
to it as a party the government of our country, its 
most coveted honors, its largest salaries, all its sweets 
of patronage and place ; to penetrate and fire so 
mighty and so compact a mass with the still more 
delicious idea that they are moving for human rights 
and the equality of man ; to call out their clergy 
from the pulpit, the librar}^ the bedside of the dying, 
the chair of the anxious inquirer, the hearth of the 
bereaved, to bless such a crusade ; to put in requisi- 
tion every species of rhetoric and sophistry, to im- 
press on the general mind that the end justifies the 
means ; that the end here to be attained is to give 
Kansas to freedom ; to stanch her blood and put out 
her fires ; and then to execute the sublime and im- 
pressive dogma that all men are born free and equal ; 

29 



450 SPEECH AT LOWELL. 

and that such a Geographical party is a well-adapted 
means to that end, — does this strike you as alto- 
gether in the spirit of Washington, and Franklin, and 
the Preamble to the Constitution, and the Farewell 
Address ? Does it strike you that if carried out it will 
prove to be a mere summer excursion to Moscow? 
Will there be no bivouac in the snow ; no avenging 
winter hanging on retreat ? No Leipsic ; no Waterloo ? 

Fellow-citizens, if the formation and growth of 
this faction of Northern States against the South has 
impressed us at all alike, you. appreciate why I said 
that I meet you with pain. It was the pain of anx- 
iety ; the pain of fear. Relieved as I am from that 
in a great degree by the late decisive demonstrations 
from Pennsylvania and Indiana, we yet feel together 
that we have a duty to perform or to attempt still. 
That which we cannot hinder here, we may at least 
deplore and expose. That which we cannot do for 
ourselves. New Hampshire, Connecticut, the great, 
calm, central mass of States may do for us. Against 
that which locally and temporarily is too strong for 
our strength here, we may at least protest. 

With courtesy then ; with justice to those from 
whom we differ ; in the fear of God ; in the love of 
our whole America ; in all singleness of heart ; ap- 
pealing from the new men to the old ; to the sober 
second thought of Massachusetts and New England ; 
to their judgment ; to their patriotism, — after some 
generations, perhaps some days, have passed, — let 
us put on record our reasons for deliberate and inex- 
tinguishable opposition to this Geographical party. 

You see. Fellow-citizens, already what I regard as 
the issue we have to try. In their mode of stating 



SPEECH AT LOWELL. 451 

that issue, I take leave totally to differ from some of 
the organs of this movement here. The question to- 
day is not as they would frame it and force it on us, 
whether we would have Kansas free soil or slave soil, 
any more than whether we worship an " anti-slavery 
God and believe in an anti-slavery Bible." The 
question is this : Shall slavery be permitted, through 
the agency of extreme Northern or extreme Southern 
opinions, to combine and array the sixteen States in 
which it does not exist, and the fifteen States in 
which it does exist, into two political parties, sepa- 
rated by a physical and social boundary, for the 
election of president, for the constituting of the two 
houses of congress, and the possession of the govern- 
ment? Much trouble it has caused us ; much evil it 
has done. It is the one stupendous trial and peril of 
our national life. But shall it bear this, the deadliest 
fruit of all ? 

I say. Not so ; never ; but certainly not yet. This 
is the issue. 

And now addressing myself to this issue, the first 
thing I have to say is, such a party is absolutely useless 
for every one of its own objects which it dares avow. 
For every one which it avows it is useless. Every 
one of them it is certain to endanger or to postpone. 

But here let me submit a preliminary thought or 
two. 

In trying the question whether the exigencies of 
the times demand such a tremendous organization as 
this, or whether we are bound to oppose it, I hold it 
to be time worse than wasted to get up a disputation 
in advance as to what party, or what section is most 
to blame for the occurrences of the last two 3'ears. 



452 SPEECH AT LOWELL. 

This is all well enough for politicians. To you and 
to me it is triflinij and it is criminal. If a resort to 
this stupendous innovation is necessary and is safe ; 
if it will work great, certain, and needful good, and 
will not formidably and probably endanger the 
domestic tranquillity and the more perfect union of 
the States, — form it, and triumph in it. If such a 
resort is unnecessary ; if it will work no certain and 
great good ; if it will disturb our peace and endanger 
our existence, let it be condemned and punished as 
moral treason, and there an end. Try it, and judge 
it b}^ itself. 

What is it to 3'ou or me ; what is it to the vast, 
innocent, and quiet body of our countrymen. North 
or South, whose folly, whose violence, whose distrust, 
whose fanaticism for slavery or against slavery, whose 
ambition low or high, is responsible for the past or 
present ? Leave this to them whose trade is politics, 
whose trade is agitation, and let us meet the practical 
measure they present us, and pass on tliat. I know 
very well there are faults on both sides ; faults South, 
faults North, faults of parties, faults of administra- 
tion. We should not have voted for the repeal of 
the Compromise. We would have voted, when that 
thing was done and its restoration was seen to be 
impossible, to secure to Kansas the opportunity, un- 
invaded, unawed, uninfluenced, to grow to the meas- 
ure of a State, to choose her own institutions, and 
then come to join the " Grand Equality." As she is 
to-day, at rest, at peace, — in some fair measure so, — 
revived, respiring, so ought she ever to have been, 
if freedom and slavery were to be allowed to meet 
breast to breast upon her surface at all. Herein is 



SPEECH AT LOWELL. 453 

fault. Herein is wrong. Beyond, far back of all 
this, years before that Compromise, years before that 
repeal, the historian of sectional antagonisms might 
gather up more matter of reciprocal crimination. 
Either region might draw out a specious manifesto 
enough on which to appeal to the reason and justice 
of the world and to the God of nations, and to the 
God of battle for that matter, if that were all. 

But to this great question, thus forced on us. Shall 
the States of the North be organized for the purpose 
of possessing the government upon the basis of this 
party, what are all these things to the purpose? 
Because there has been violence and blame, are you 
therefore to fly on a remedy ten thousand times 
worse than the disease ? We should like to see 
slavery cease from the earth ; but should we like to 
see black regiments from the West Indies landing at 
Charleston or New Orleans to help on emancipation ? 
We would like to see Kansas grow up to freedom ; 
but should we like to see the ba3^onets that stormed 
the Redan and the Malakoff glittering there to effect 
it ? This glorifying him who does his own work, and 
this denunciation of him who holds a slave ; this sing- 
ing of noisy songs, and this preaching of Sharpe's 
rifle sermons ; these lingering lamentations about the 
spread of the cotton plant, about the annexing of 
Louisiana by Jefferson, and of Florida by John 
Quincy Adams, do not touch the question before the 
nation. That question is about the new party. That 
question is on combining the North against the South 
on slavery to win the government. Shall that party, 
shall that attempt triumph, or shall it perish under 
the condemnation of your patriotism ? 



454 SPEECH AT LOWELL. 

Is that needful ? Is that just ? Is that prudent ? 
That is the question ; and to that hold up its orators, 
and poets, and preachers ; and let the sound and 
calm judgment of America decide it. 

Something else when that is decided, as it seems 
now likely to be, we shall have to do. Some changes 
of administrative politics must be and will be had. 
But in the mean time, and in the first place, the 
question is. Shall your Geographical party live or 
die? 

I have said, then, for my first reason of opposition, 
that for any and every one of the objects this new 
party dares to avow, it is absolutely useless. It is 
no more needed for any object it dares to avow, than 
thirty thousand of Marshal Pelissier's Zouaves are 
needed in Kansas to-day. 

And on this question of necessity is not the burden 
of proof on him who undertakes to introduce into our 
political order and experience so tremendous a novelty 
as this ? Is not the presumption in the first instance 
altogether against getting up a Geographical party 
on slavery for possession of the government ? Con- 
sidering that such a thing, if not necessarily and in- 
evitably poison, is, however, extreme medicine at the 
best ; that it has been down to this hour admitted to 
be and proclaimed to be the one great peril of our 
system by all who have loved it best and studied it 
most deeply ; that every first-class intelligence and 
character in our history of whatever type of politics, 
and what is quite as important, the sound and sober 
general mind and heart, has held and taught this, is 
it too much to say that he whose act outrages our 
oldest, and most fixed, and most implicit habits of 



SPEECH AT LOWELL. 455 

thought and most cherished traditions on this sub- 
ject ; who mocks at what we have supposed our most 
salutary and most reasonable fears ; who laughs at a 
danger to the American confederacy, at which the 
firmness of Washington, the courage of Hamilton, 
and the hopeful and trusting philanthropy and phi- 
losophy of Jefferson, confident always of his country- 
men, at which these men trembled, — is it too much 
to tell the propounder of this project that he shall 
make out its necessity, or he shall be nonsuited 
on his own case ? I say to him, then, Pray confine 
yourself in the first instance to the point of necessity. 
Do not evade that question. Don't mix others with 
it. Tell us exactly what you really propose to do 
about slavery, without phrases, and then show us 
that if it ought to be done it is necessary to combine 
the Northern States against the South on a presiden- 
tial election in order to do it. Speak to this. Don't 
tell us how provoked you are, or how provoked the 
Rev. Mr. Tliis, or the Hon. Mr. That, has come to 
be against the South ; how passionately one Southern 
member spoke, or another Southern member acted ; 
how wicked it was in Washington to hold slaves, and 
what a covenant with hell a Constitution is which 
returns the fugitive to the master. Don't exasperate 
yourself irrelevantly. Don't m3^stify or trick us with 
figures to prove that the seventeen millions of people 
in the Northern States contribute three fourths of the 
whole aggregate of $4,500,000,000 of annual indus- 
trial production. This, if it were true, or were not 
true, might beget vanity, and the lust of sectional 
dominion, and contempt ; but it is nothing at all to 
the purpose. Don't say you want to teach the South 



456 SPEECH AT LOWELL. 

this thing or that thing. Don't say you want to 
avenge on a section to-day the annexation of Louisi- 
ana or Florida or Texas. Don't keep coming down 
on the South ; just condescend to come down on the 
question. What are your objects precisely ; and how 
comes this new and dangerous combination of States 
necessary to accomplish them ? 

What, then, first, are the objects of the Geograph- 
ical party, and is such a party necessary for such 
objects ? I ask now for its measures. What would 
it do if it could? 

To find out these to reasonable perfection, for me, 
at least, has not been easy. It is not easy to know 
where to look for the authentic evidence of them. 
The Philadelphia platform and Colonel Fremont's 
letter of acceptance are part of that evidence. They 
are not all — they are not the most important part. 
You must go elsewhere for it. The actual creed and 
the real objects must be sought in the tone and spirit 
of their electioneering; in the topics of their leaders ; 
in the aggregate of the impression their whole appeal 
is calculated to make on the public mind and the col- 
lective feelings of the North. These speak the aims, 
these make up the life, these accomplish the mission 
of a part3\ By these together judge it. 

Much meditating on this evidence, I arrive at two 
results. I find one object distinctly propounded ; one 
of great interest to the Northern sentiment, and one 
which you and I and all should rejoice to see consti- 
tutionally and safely accomplished at the right time 
and in the right way, — and that is the accession of 
Kansas as a free State to the Union. This is one. 
Beyond, behind this, more or less dim, more or less 



SPEECH AT LOWELL. 457 

frowning, more or less glittering, more or less consti- 
tutional, there looms another range or another show 
of objects, swelling and subsiding and changing as 
you look, — " in many a frozen, many a fiery Alp," — 
cloud-land, to dazzle one man's eye, to disappear 
altogether before the gaze of another, as the show- 
man pleases. These are their other objects. 

Turn first, then, to that one single practical and 

specific measure which they present to the North, and 

on which they boast themselves by eminence and ex- 

. cellence the friends of Kansas, — the admission of 

that territory as a free State. 

And now if this is all, will any sane and honest 
man, uncommitted, tell you that there is a necessity 
for this tremendous experiment of an organization 
and precipitation of North on South to achieve it? 
Have you, has one of you, has one human being 
north of the line of geographical separation, a par- 
ticle of doubt that if Kansas has peace under the 
reign of law for two years, for twelve months, the 
energies of liberty, acting through unforced, un- 
checked, and normal free-soil immigration, would fill 
her with freedom, and the institutions of freedom, as 
the waters fill the sea ? What more than such peace 
under such rule of law do you want ? What more 
does Mr. Speaker Banks think you want ? Legisla- 
tion of anybody? No. Interference by anybody? 
No, Hear him : — 

"Now for this [the repeal of the Compromise] we have a 
remedy. It is not that we shall legislate against the South on 
the subject of slavery. It is not that we shall raise the question 
whether in future territories slavery shall be permitted or not. 
We lay aside all these questions, and stand distinctly and sim- 
ply on the proposition that that which gave peace to the country 



458 SPEECH AT LOWELL. 

in 1820, that which consummated the peace of the country in 
1850, ought to be made good by the government of the United 
States, and with the consent of the American people. [Applause.] 
That is all. No more, no less — no better, no worse. That is 
all we ask — that the acts of 1820 and 1850 shall be made good, 
in the place of conflagration, and murder, and civil war for the 
year 1856 — by the voice of the American people, South, let me 
say, as well as North. [Applause.] Now, to do that no legis- 
lation is required. It is not necessary that the halls of congTess 
should be opened again to agitation. We desire the election of 
a man to the presidency of the United States of simple views 
and of determined will, — a man who will exert the influence 
of this government in that portion of the territory of the United 
States, so as to allow its people to settle the question for them- 
selves there." 

What is this but to say, Put out the conflagration, 
stop the reign of violence, give peace, law, and order 
to rule, and Kansas will have freedom, if she does 
not prefer slavery, as certainly she will not. And 
such, I take it, is the all but universal judgment of 
the North. 

Well ; but do they answer. Oh, very true ; but we 
cannot have this peace unless the North gets possession 
of the government. Mr. Buchanan's administration 
will not insure it. Mr. Fillmore's administration will 
not insure it. 

I might content myself with replying that the con- 
dition of Kansas at this hour gives this extravagance 
to the winds. I will not say that territory to-day is as 
quiet as Middlesex ; but I will say that before the next 
President takes his seat it will be as free as Middle- 
sex. It has a majority for freedom, and it is increas- 
ing. Of a population of about thirty thousand, some 
five thousand only are from the slave States. 

I will not leave it on that reply. With what color 



SPEECH AT LOWELL. 459 

of justice, I choose to add, do the leaders of this 
party assume to tell you that they alone desire to 
give or are able to insure Kansas her only chance to 
be free ? With what justice do they tell you that 
the Democratic party, or the Fillmore party, refuse 
to give her peace, and all the practical opportunities 
of liberty ? Do they suppose that we have not read 
the record of the last two months of the last con- 
gress ? We, whose sons and brothers are on that 
disturbed and sad soil ; we, who deplore the repeal 
of the Compromise quite as much as they do ; we, 
who should see with exultation and thanksgiving to 
God the peaceful victories of freedom in that fron- 
tier ; we, who hate and dread the gamblings of 
politicians, and the selfish and low tactics of party, 
but should rejoice unspeakably to see the statesman- 
ship of our country securing the government of that 
territory to its own free will, — do they suppose that 
we did not read, or could not understand, or cannot 
remember how the leaders and the members of every 
party in congress dealt with this great subject ? 
Republicans the only helpers of Kansas to freedom, 
indeed ! How did they propose to reach the object ? 
By making some twenty five thousand people into a 
sovereign State, and bringing it, just as it was, into 
the Union under the Topeka constitution ! Yes, you 
would have made them a State extempore. You 
would have given to these twenty-five thousand 
people, organized as absolutely without law and 
against law as if two thousand should get together 
on Boston Common and make a government, the 
same voice in the Senate of the United States which 
the Constitution gives to New York, to Pennsyl- 



460 SPEECH AT LOWELL. 

vania, to Virginia, to Massachusetts ; the power to 
turn the scale and decide the vote on a debate of war 
and peace, or a treaty of boundary, or of commerce, 
or a nomination to the highest judicial or diplomatic 
office in the Constitution. 

This they would have done, — a measure of passion ; 
an act for which the file affords no precedent ; revo- 
lutionary almost ; almost a crime in the name of 
liberty. 

Defeated in this, they would do nothing. They 
would allow nobody else to do any thing. They 
passed Mr. Dunn's bill to be sure, — the first one 
in the history of this government which legislated 
human beings directly into a state of slavery ; but 
as they engrafted the restoration of the Missouri 
Compromise into it, they knew it could not become 
a law, and that goes for nothing. There they stuck ; 
and had they not repeatedly an opportunity to unite 
in putting out the fires, and stanching the blood, 
and hushing the shrieks of Kansas ; in giving her a 
chance to revive and respire ; in giving her a chance 
to choose herself of the fruit of the tree of liberty 
and live ? Yes ; repeatedly. Did they avail them- 
selves of it ? No. Did they allow others to do so ? 
No. No ! Did not Mr. Toombs present a bill, and 
did not the Senate pass it and send it to the House ? 
Did not this bill propose an early admission of 
Kansas, — in so far just what the Republicans 
wanted ? Did it not annul the more obnoxious part 
of the obnoxious laws of the territorial legislature ? 
Did it not provide for registration of voters, com- 
missioners to take census of inhabitants, and an 
interval of ample sufficiency for those whom vio- 



SPEECH AT LOWELL. 461 

lence had expelled to return and assert their rights ? 
Did not Mr. Hale of New Hampshire say of this : — 

" I take this occasion to say that the bill, as a whole, does 
great credit to the magnanimity, to the patriotism, and to the 
sense of justice of the honorable Senator who introduced it. It 
is a much fairer bill than I expected from that latitude. I say 
so because I am always willing and determined, when I have 
occasion to speak any thing, to do ample justice. I think the 

BILL IS ALMOST UNEXCEPTIOXABLE. " 

Did the Republicans — when they found that the 
Missouri Compromise could not be restored, nor 
Kansas be admitted instantly under the Topeka 
constitution — in order to stanch the blood, and to 
silence the cry of the territory, the crime against 
wdiich they assumed to prosecute and avenge — give 
ground an inch? Would they take a single step 
towards temporary truce even, or a time to breathe ? 
Not one, — Mr. Clayton, Mr. Crittenden in the 
Senate, and Mr. Haven in the House, held up suc- 
cessively the olive-branch, tempted and entreated 
them, by eloquence, and reason, and feeling, to do 
something, if they could not do all, or what they 
wished, to close the feast of horrors I — but not a 
finger would they lift. Cold and motionless as the 
marble columns about them, — the 25,000 men and 
the Topeka constitution should come in a State — as 
they knew it would not — or murder, arson, and 
rapine might waste Kansas, and electioneer for the 
Geographical party. 

I do not say they intended that the reign of terror 
should continue in Kansas ; all of them could not 
have so intended ; I do not say that any of them did. 
I say that if it had continued, a full share of the 



462 SPEECH AT LOWELL. 

responsibility had been theirs. I say that it is no 
thanks to them that it has ceased. I say that it does 
not lie in their mouths to tell the calm, just, and rea- 
sonable men of the North that they are the only party, 
and a combination of States against States the only 
means, of giving to Kansas the freedom we all desire 
for her. 

Easy it were in my judgment to demonstrate or af- 
ford the highest degree of probability that their 
triumph would defeat, or postpone, or impair and 
profane the consummation which they seek. But I 
am confined to the question of the necessity of their 
measures, for the attainment of our ends. 

So much for this function of the new party, the ad- 
mission of Kansas as a free State. To this end it is 
no more needed than sixteen black regiments from 
the Leeward Islands. 

Beyond this, what are its objects ? With anxious 
and curious desire to comprehend the whole of this 
extraordinary phenomenon, I have extreme difficulty 
in making these ulterior objects out. Some of them 
are unavowed, I suppose ; some of them are avowed 
in one place and denied in another; some of the 
speakers have one, some have another. If you tell 
them their aims are dangerous, unconstitutional, revo- 
lutionary, Mr. Banks shall reply, " Not a bit of it ; 
we don't mean to legislate against the South on 
slavery at all ; we don't mean to say that future ter- 
ritories shall not have slavery if they like it, to their 
hearts' content. We want nothing and nobody but 
a President of ' simple views and determined will,' 
who will allow the 'people of Kansas to settle the 
question for themselves there.' " If thereupon you 



SPEECH AT LOWELL. 463 

answer, Well, if this is all, there really seems to be 
no great need of evoking such a tremendous spirit as 
the combination of North against South to reach it ; 
less force, less fire, less steam, less wear and tear of 
machinery, would do the business, one would think ; 
up rises another, more fervid, more gloomy, better 
informed, or not so cunning, and exclaims, " No, that 
is not all! that is hardly the beginning. We sing 
and hear a strain of far higher mood than that ; we 
have the tide of slavery to roll back ; the annexation 
of Louisiana and Texas to avenge or compensate ; 
we too would taste the sweets of power, and we will 
have power ; it is a new order of the ages we bring 
on ; our place of worship (such is Governor Seward's 
expression) is neither in this mountain, nor yet in 
Jerusalem; our mission is equality and freedom to 
all men." 

To seek, through all this Babel of contradictory 
and irresponsible declarations, what they really de- 
sign to do, were vain and idle. To maintain the 
necessity of organizing a party like this, to accomplish 
no mortal can tell us what, seems pretty bold dealing 
with the intelligence of the country. That which it 
is impossible to state, it is not apparently needful to 
try to do. If there is no perplexity of plot to be un- 
ravelled, why is such a divinity invoked? If there 
is one, will they show us what it is ? 

I must not forget, in this search for their objects, 
outside of Kansas, that they have been much in the 
habit of sending us to the Declaration of Independ- 
ence to find them. Their platform does so ; their 
orators are said to do so. If I understand Governor 
Seward, in his first speech in Detroit, he does so. 



464 SPEECH AT LOWELL. 

Reverend teachers of Republicanism do so. They 
are the party of the DecLaration of Independence, 
and not a Geographical party. Here are two of their 
resolutions : — 

" Resolved, That the maintenance of the principles pro- 
mulgated in the Declaration of Independence, and embodied in 
the Federal Constitution, are essential to the preservation of our 
republican institutions; and that the Federal Constitution, the 
rights of the States, and the union of the States, shall be pre- 
served. 

'■'■ Resolved, That, with our republican fathers, we hold it to 
be self-evident truth that all men are endowed with inalienable 
right to ' life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness,' and that 
the primary object and ulterior design of our Federal Government 
were to secure these rights to all persons within its exclusive ju- 
risdiction; that, as our republican fathers, when they had abol- 
ished slavery in all our national territory, ordained that no person 
should be deprived of 'life, liberty, or property,' without due 
process of law, it becomes our duty to maintain this provision 
of the Constitution against all attempts to violate it, for the 
purpose of establishing slavery in the territories of the United 
States, by positive legislation prohibiting its existence or exten- 
sion therein; that we deny the authority of Congress, of a 
territorial legislature, or any individual or association of individ- 
uals, to give legal assistance to slavery in any Territory of the 
United States, while the present Constitution shall be main- 
tained.'' 

And yet what information does this afford about 
the object of the new party? How do we know 
what they mean to do, and whether it ought to be 
done, and whether a combination of free States to do 
it is fit and is necessary any the more for this ? It is a 
thing so extraordinary for a political party to put for- 
ward the Declaration of Independence as its platform, 
or as a prominent and distinguishing part of its plat- 
form, and to solicit the votes of a section of the States 



SPEECH AT LOWELL. 465 

of this Union by the boast that it claims some special 
and characteristic relation to that immortal act and 
composition ; that it means to put it to some use, and 
derive from it some power, or some rule of interpreta- 
tion, or some motive to governmental action, which 
are new and peculiar to itself, — that we pause on 
it with wonder, and perplexity, and alarm. 

If a newly organized political party should an- 
nounce that its principles were the principles of the 
Bible, and its spirit and aims the spirit and aims of 
the Bible ; should put this ostentatiously in its plat- 
form, write it on its flags, carry it about by torchlight, 
thunder it from its pulpits and from the stands of 
its mass-meeting speakers, lay or clerical ; should you 
not feel some small or some considerable confusion, 
perplexity, misgiving, mirth, and fear, in view of such 
demonstration? If you did not, or if you did, think 
it a poor, arrogant, impious, and hypocritical method 
of electioneering, would you not wish to know with 
a trifle more of precision and fulness what were these 
principles, and that spirit, and those aims of the 
Bible thus suddenly adopted into the creed of a 
party? If they told you they meant those principles 
and that spirit "promulgated in the Bible" and 
" embodied in the Constitution," should you feel that 
you knew much more than you did before ? So here. 
What do these mean by this adoption of the Declara- 
tion of Independence into their creed? What are 
" those principles promulgated " in it, and ''embodied in 
the Constitution''? The Declaration announces all 
men to be born free and equal, and to have certain 
inalienable rights, among which is the right to liberty. 
The Constitution sends back the fugitive slave to his 

80 



466 SPEECH AT LOWELL. 

master. Is this a case of a principle promulgated in 
one, and embodied in the other? If not, how does 
their platform deal with it ? What are the " princi- 
ples so embodied " ? In what article, in what word, 
are they so? Which do they go for, the " promulga- 
tion," or the " embodiment " ? What practical -legis- 
lation, or administration, are they supposed to prescribe 
or warrant ? Nay, come a little closer ; what do 
they intend to say they get from the Declaration, or 
do by means of the Declaration, more than anybody 
else gets from it, and does by means of it ? Would 
they venture the proposition that the Federal Gov- 
ernment derives any powers, any one power, from 
that source ? Certainly not ; or if so, it is the most 
dangerous and most revolutionary heresy ever yet 
promulgated. Would they say that they call in the 
Declaration to interpret the language of the Constitu- 
tion ? I suppose not ; for, that the meaning of those 
who constructed that consummate frame of govern- 
ment, and weighed, measured, and stamped its words 
of gold, and drew, or sought to draw, with so much 
precision and certainty, the delicate line which parts 
the powers given to the Union from those retained to 
the States or the peo^^le, and therein ordained that all 
powers not delegated to the United States, or pro- 
hibited to the States, are reserved respectively to the 
States or the people, — that this language, in this in- 
strument of 1787, can be interpreted^ enlarged or 
narrowed, darkened or illustrated by the language of 
that other instrument, not less renowned, penned in 
1776, in a time and for a purpose so different, — that 
thrilling appeal to the reason and justice of nations, 
in which a people assume to vindicate upon grounds 



SPEECH AT LOWELL. 467 

of natural right their claim to take their place in the 
great equality of States, and then announce their 
sublime decision to make their claim good by revolu- 
tion and battle, — composed to engage the sympathies 
of mankind for the new nation, and to lift up its own 
spirit to the demands of the great crisis, — that the 
latter of these papers, in point of time, is to be inter- 
preted by the former in any sense of which any jurist 
or any reader of his mother-tongue can form con- 
ception, is a proposition too extravagant to be imputed 
to the author of the platform. 

Well, then, if they do not use the Declaration as a 
source of power, nor as a help to construction, what 
do they mean to do with, or do by it? How profiteth 
it them any more than others? than us? Why, they 
would say they were going to execute their constitu- 
tional powers '' in the sinrit of the Declaration." 
That is it, is it? They are to take the constitutional 
powers as they exist — to find them as you find 
them, and as all find them, by just and legitimate in- 
terpretation. But the difference between jou and 
them is, they " are going to execute them in the spirit 
of the Declaration." Well, now, what does even this, 
mean? What sort of execution is this to insure? 
How do you apply your rule? Nay, what is the 
rule ? What is the spirit of the Declaration in this 
behalf? Is it any thing more than its meaning? It 
is what the framers of it, the Congress of 1776, then 
meant, by their language, is it not? Did they mean 
then to assert that slaves had an inalienable right to 
liberty ? Did they mean to make any assertion at all 
upon the subject of master and slave ? Was that ap- 
plication of this generality of natural right in their 



468 SPEECH AT LOWELL. 

contemplation in any, the least degree ? Were they 
consciously and intentionally conceding and proclaim- 
ing that it was a sin to hold a slave and a duty to 
emancipate ? 

How the student of the history of that act may 
answer this inquiry is not now to the purpose. The 
question is not now on the actual principles of the 
Declaration as its framers understood and limited and 
applied them. It is on the meaning of the framers 
of the Republican platform. What is their " spirit 
of the Declaration," and how do they mean to use it ; 
and what do they mean to draw from it in executing 
the Constitution ? If they will point out one single 
object they can or design to accomplish through it, 
which other parties have not accomplished and can- 
not accomplish, by administering the government upon 
these principles of equal and exact justice to all the 
States and all the sections, in the purpose of promoting 
internal tranquillity and a more perfect Union, which 
have heretofore constituted the recognized creed of 
American statesmanship, we can then judge whether 
this parade of that instrument and that act in their 
.platform has any meaning at all, and if so whether 
what is meant is needful or safe. We can then judge 
whether they have used a form of language intended 
to lead the passionate and unthinking to believe they 
intended something, and yet to leave themselves at 
liberty to 2^rotest, when examined on it, that they in- 
tended nothing. We can then judge whether this 
language of their creed is revolutionary and danger- 
ous, or whether it merely — 

" Palters witli us in a double sense ; 
That keeps the word of promise to our ear, 
And breaks it to our hope." 



SPEECH AT LOWELL. 469 

Holding then, Fellow-citizens, the clear and settled 
conviction that this combination of Northern States 
against the Soutli is totally unnecessary for any pur- 
pose, I record my protest against the attempt to form 
it and give it power. No interest of freedom re- 
quires or will be helped by it. No aspects of slavery 
justify it. It Avill not give liberty to an acre, or to a 
man, one hour sooner than they will have it without. 
It will not shorten or lighten the rule or limit the 
spread of slavery in the least degree. 

And is not this enough to deter you from an inno- 
vation so vast, an experiment so untried, an agency 
of influences so incapable to be calculated ? 

But what if, more than novel and more than need- 
less, it proves only an enormous evil ? What if it 
proves, of all the fruits that slavery has borne yet, 
the deadliest ? 

To many I know the bare imagination of such fear 
is matter of mirth. Seeing farther than I can see, or 
more sanguine, or more bold, for them it seems with- 
out terror ; or promises only good, or a preponder- 
ance of good, or to be a necessary evil and a risk 
worth taking at the worst. Let me dare to avow 
that which I assuredly believe and deeply feel. To 
me, to many thoughtful men whose opinions are far 
more important than mine, there is occasion for the 
wisdom of fear. 

The grounds and the particulars of the apprehen- 
sion with which such men may regard this party, 
there is no need here and now to open at large. 

We have come so near to the time when practical 
consequences are to take the place of our conjectures, 
— or to be scattered to the winds for ever or for a 



470 SPEECH AT LOWELL. 

space, if this party is defeated, — that I may forbear 
to display them in detail. I compress my convic- 
tions upon the whole subject of the proposed organi- 
zation in a brief, articulate enumeration, and deliver 
them to your judgment. 

They are : — 

That in the exact sense in which the language has 
been used, and the thing been held out for warning 
in the Farewell Address, and by all the illustrious 
men of both schools of our politics, of Washington 
and of Jefferson, whom heretofore the American peo- 
ple has regarded as its safest and most sagacious 
councillors, — but on a scale more gigantic and 
swayed by passions far more incapable of control or 
measure than they have any of them feared, — it is 
a G-eographical 'party\ — confined exclusively in fact 
and in the nature of things to one of the two great 
rescions into which the American States are distrib- 
uted ; seeking objects, resting on principles, culti- 
vating dispositions, and exerting an aggregate of 
influence and impressions calculated to unite all on 
one side of the line which parts the two regions 
against all on the other, upon the single subject on 
which, without the utmost exercise of forbearance, 
sense, and virtue, they cannot live at peace ; but for 
which they could not fail to be one people for ever ; 
by reason of which their disruption is possible at all 
times. 

That in the sense of the language heretofore em- 
ployed in American politics and history to describe 
this kind of thing there is not now and there never 
has been another Geographical party ; that both the 
other two which now divide or now unite the people, 



SPEECH AT LOWELL. 471 

— extending through every State North and South, 
professing political and industrial creeds, seeking ob- 
jects, breathing a spirit and presenting candidates 
which every region may own alike, exerting each an 
aggregate of influence and impression calculated to 
foster an American feeling and not a sectional ani- 
mosity ; — that both these — whatever else may be 
alleged against them — are national parties. 

That the Geographical party, in its nature and 
spirit and immediate object of taking possession of 
the government, is founded in essential injustice to 
the section which it excludes; that in ethics and 
reason these States are partners, and stockholders, 
and contractors each with all, — a partnership, an 
incorporation for all the good and glory and progress 
to which national life may aspire ; that therefore, 
although the will of the majority is the law of the 
mighty concern, yet that that requires a will obedient 
to justice ; and it is not just that a section, or a class 
of partners should associate among themselves by 
that organization called a party, to appropriate, to 
the practical exclusion of the rest, the government, 
and all the honor, profit, and power which belongs to 
its possession and administration, for an indefinite 
period, or for a presidential term, forasmuch as it 
violates or deserts the great implied agreement of 
the society — implied in the act of coming into the 
federal tie — that a property, a privilege, a power, a 
glory so large, so desirable, as the possession and 
administration of the government, shall pass about 
by a just and equitable rotation, and every section 
shall at all times have its share : 

That if the manner in which the South has per- 



472 SrEECH AT LOWELL. 

formed its duties to the Union and to the Northern 
section of States be regarded as a whole, from the 
adoption of the Constitution to this day, it affords no 
justification of the attempt to take possession of the 
government, to the exclusion of that section of States; 
that her federal obligations, as such, have been dis- 
charged as the general fact ; that she has set no 
example of such sectional exclusion as this ; that her 
federal life and activities have been exerted in and 
through national parties, and as a branch or wing 
thereof; that she has supplied her proportionate 
share of capacity and valor to the service of the 
whole country, and that the bad language, and vio- 
lent acts, and treasonable devices of her bad men 
create no case for the injustice here meditated : 

That the repeal of the Missouri Compromise, and 
the disposition of the South to form Kansas into a 
slave State, while Ave condemn and deplore the for- 
mer, and demand that the free-will of all its people 
shall be permitted to disappoint the latter, creating 
no necessity for the Geographical party, afford no 
excuse for the injustice meditated : 

That such a party is dangerous to the internal tran- 
quillity and general welfare of the United States, and 
that it tends by probable and natural consequence 
less or more remote to their separation. 

Such was once, was ever, until to-day, the uni- 
versal judgment of wise and honest men and true 
patriots ; and by their counsels it is safe, moral, and 
respectable to abide. 

That such a party, militant or triumphant, elec- 
tioneering for the administration or in possession of 
it, must exert influences of wide and various evil, 



SPEECH AT LOWELL. 473 

even whether they do or do not reach to the over- 
throw of our system ; that it accustoms the people of 
each section to turn from contemplating that fair and 
grand ideal, the whole America, and to find their 
country in one of its fragments ; a revolution of the 
public affections, and a substitution of a new public 
life; that it accustoms them to exaggerate, intensify, 
and put forward into every thing the one element of 
discord and diversity, and to neglect the cultivation 
of the less energetic elements of resemblance and 
union ; that, in fixing their attention on a single sub- 
ject, and that one apjDcaling simply to passion and 
emotion, to pride, to fear, to moral sensibilities, it 
exasperates and embitters the general temper, and 
sows the seeds of sentiments which we did not in- 
herit, but which we may transmit, — sentiments of 
the vehement and energetic class which form and 
unform nations ; that it has to an extraordinary de- 
gree changed the tone of political discussion in this 
its own section, and made it intolerant, immoral, abu- 
sive, and insolent to those who differ, to an extent to 
which our party disputes have before afforded no 
example ; that it tends to place moderate men and 
national men. North and South, in a false position, 
by presenting to them the alternative of treason to 
the whole or treason to the section, — thus putting 
modei-ate counsels to shame, and destroying the in- 
fluence which might help to restore the good temper 
and generous affection of the parts and the whole. 

That while it is organized on the single basis of 
resistance to what it calls the slave power, it miscon- 
ceives or disregards the true duties of the patriotism, 
philanthropy, and Christianity of the Free States in 



474 SPEECH AT LOWELL. 

the matter of slavery ; that it excites hatred of the 
master, but no prudent, nor reasonable, nor useful 
love of the slave ; that to hinder the mere extension 
of that relation over more area, although one good 
thing, is not the onl}^ one demanded ; that even that 
may be rendered worse than useless by the mode of 
seeking to effect it ; that whatsoever else we do or 
attempt, in whatsoever else our power comes short 
of our wishes in this regard, we are bound to know 
that discords and animosity on this subject between 
North and South, however promoted, do but re- 
tard the training for freedom and postpone the day 
of its gradual and peaceful attainment. If ye so hate 
the master, or so fear him, or so contend with him, 
that ye rivet the fetters of the slave or lengthen the 
term of his slavery, what reward have ye or has he? 
With these opinions. Fellow-citizens, I aim, in this 
election, at one single object ; I feel but one single 
hope, and one single fear. To me, all of you, all 
men who aim at that object and share that hope and 
that fear, seem allies, brothers, partners of a great 
toil, a great duty, and a common fate. For the hour, 
opinions upon other things, old party creeds adapted 
for quiet times, old party names and symbols and 
squabbles and differences about details of administra- 
tion, seem to me hushed, suspended, irrelevant, tri- 
fling, — the small cares of a master of ceremonies in 
the palace on the morning of the revolution, about 
red heels, small-clothes, and buckles in the shoe, 
within an hour of the final storm. I care no more 
now whether my co-worker is a Democrat, or an 
American, or an old Whig, a Northern man or a Cal- 
ifornia man, than you should care. if a fire fell on 



SPEECH AT LOWELL. 475 

your city in winter and was devouring your work- 
shops and streets one after another, and houseless 
women and children and old men and sick were seen 
hovering on the side of the river in the snow, whether 
he who passed or received your buckets was rocked 
in his cradle on this side of the sea or the other ; 
whether he was an Arminian or Calvinist ; a ten 
hours' labor man or a twenty-four hours' labor man. 
The election once over, we are our several selves 
again. ''If we get well," the sick man said, when 
with difficulty reconciled to his enemy, both being 
supposed dying, " if we get well, it all goes for 
nothing." 

Certainly somewhat there is in the position of all 
of us a little trying, — ties of years, which knit some 
of us together, are broken ; cold regards are turned 
on us, and bitter language and slander, cruel as the 
grave, is ours. 

" I cannot but remember such things were, 
That were most precious to me." 

You have decided. Fellow Whigs, that you can 
best contribute to the grand end we all seek, by a 
vote for Mr. Fillmore. I, a Whig all my life, a Whig 
in all things, and, as regards all other names, a Whig 
to-day, have thought I could discharge my duty most 
effectually by voting for Mr. Buchanan and Mr. 
Breckenridge ; and I shall do it. The justice I am 
but too happy in rendering you, will you deny to me ? 
In doing this, I neither join the Democratic party, 
nor retract any opinion on the details of its policy, 
nor acquit it of its share of blame in bringing on the 
a^tations of the hour. But there are traits, there 
are sentiments, there are specialties of capacity and 



476 SPEECH AT LOWELL. 

of function, that make a party as they make a man, 
which fit it in an extraordinary degree for special 
service in special crises, — to meet particular forms 
of danger by exactly adapted resistance — to fight 
fire with fire — to encounter by a sharper, more 
energetic, and more pronounced antagonism the pre- 
cise type of evil which assails the State. In this way 
every great party successively becomes the saviour 
of the Constitution.. There was never an election 
contest that in denouncing the particulars of its 
policy I did not admit that the characteristic of the 
Democratic party was this : that it had burned ever 
with that great master-passion this hour demands — 
a youthful, vehement, exultant, and progressive na- 
tionality. Through some errors, into some perils, it 
has been led by it ; it may be so again ; we may 
require to temper and restrain it, but to-day we need 
it all, we need it all ! — the hopes — the boasts — 
the pride — the universal tolerance — the gay and 
festive defiance of foreigjn dictation — the flag: — the 
music — all the emotions — all the traits — all the 
energies, that have won their victories of war, and 
their miracles of national advancement, — the coun- 
try needs them all now to win a victory of peace. 
That done, I will pass again, happy and content, into 
that minority of conservatism in which I have passed 
my life. 

To some, no doubt, the purport and tone of much 
that I have said may seem to be the utterance and 
the spirit of fear. Professors among their classes, 
preachers to implicit congregations, the men and 
women of emotion and sentiment, will mock at such 
apprehensions. I wish them joy of their discern- 



SPEECH AT LOWELL. 477 

ment ; of the depth of their readings of history ; of 
the soundness of their nerves. Let me excuse myself 
in the words of an English statesman, then and ever 
conspicuous for spirit and courage, the present prime 
minister of England, in a crisis of England far less 
uro'ent than this. " Tell me not that this is the Ian- 
guage of intimidation ; tell me not that I am appeal- 
incv to the fears instead of to the reason of the House. 
In matters of such high concern, which involve not 
personal and individual considerations, but the wel- 
fare of one's country, no man ought to be .ashamed 
of being counselled by his fears. But the fears to 
which I appeal are the fears which the brave may 
acknowledge, and the wise need not blush to own. 
The fear to which I appeal is that early and provi- 
dent fear which Mr. Burke so beautifully describes 
as being the mother of safety. ' Early and provident 
fear,' says Mr. Burke, ' is the mother of safety, for in 
that state of things the mind is firm and collected, 
and the judgment unembarrassed ; but when fear 
and the thing feared come on together and press 
upon us at once, even deliberation, which at other 
times saves us, becomes our ruin, because it delays 
decision; and when the peril is instant, decision 
should be instant too.' To this fear I am not 
ashamed of appealing ; by this fear legislators and 
statesmen ought ever to be ruled ; and he who will 
not listen to this fear, and refuses to be guided by 
its counsel, may go and break his lances against 
windmills, but the court of chancery should enjoin 
him to abstain from meddling with public affairs." 

They taunt you with being " Union-savers." I 
never thought that a sarcasm of the first magnitude, 



478 SPEECH AT LOWELL. 

but as men can but do their best, let it go for what 
they think it worth. I take for granted, Fellow- 
citizens, that 3^ou, that all of us, despise cant and 
hypocrisy in all things, — the feigning a fear not felt, 
the cry of peril not believed to exist, all meanness 
and all wickedness of falsehood in our dealings with 
the mind of the people. But I take it for granted, 
too, that we are above the cowardice and immorality 
of suppressing our sense of a danger, threatening 
precious interests and possible to be averted, from 
the dread of jokers of jokes ; and that we are above 
the folly of yielding that vast advantage which deep 
convictions give to earnest men in the dissensions of 
the Republic. Think what a thing it were to win 
the proud and sounding name in reality which they 
bestow in derision ! Suppose, only su23pose it so for 
the argument, that there is danger, overestimated 
perhaps by the solicitude of filial love, but real or 
probable and less or more remote, — suppose, merely 
for the supposition, that Washington had reason to 
leave that warning against this kind of geographical 
combinations, under all pretexts^ and that this one 
comes within the spirit and the terms of that warn- 
ing, — suppose it to be so that we are right ; that 
vehement passions, eager philanthropy, moral emo- 
tions not patient nor comprehensive of the indispen- 
sable limitations of political duty ; that anger, pride, 
ambition, the lust of sectional power, the jealousy of 
sectional aggression, the pursuit even of ends just 
and desirable by means disproportioned and needless 
and exasperating — the excess and outbreak of vir- 
tues, by which more surely than by vices a country 
may be undone, — that these all working in an un- 



SPEECH AT LOWELL. 479 

usual conjuncture of affairs and state of public tem- 
per, have exposed and are exposing this Union to 
danger less or more remote, — and then suppose that 
by some word seasonably uttered, some vote openly 
and courageously given, some sincere conviction 
plainly expressed, we could do something to earn 
the reality of the praise which they give us in jest, — 
something for the safety, something for the peace, of 
this holy and beautiful house of our fathers, — some- 
thing, were it ever so little, — would not this be 
compensation for the laughter of fools ; ay ! for 
alienated friendships, averted faces, and the serpent 
tooth of slander, — a thing worth dying for, and even 
worth having lived for ? 



480 ADDRESS ON THE FOURTH OF JULY. 



AMERICAN NATIONALITY. 



AN ORATION DELI\T:RED IN BOSTON ON THE EIGHTY-SECOND 
ANNIVERSARY OF AMERICAN INDEPENDENCE, JULY 5, 1858. 



It is well that m our year, so busy, so secular, so 
discordant, there comes one day when the word is, 
and when the emotion is, " Our country, our whole 
country, and nothing but our country." It is well 
that law, our only sovereign on earth ; duty, not less 
the daughter of God, not less within her sj)here su- 
preme ; custom, not old alone, but honored and useful ; 
memories; our hearts, — have set a time in which — 
scythe, loom, and anvil stilled, shops shut, wharves si- 
lent, the flag, — our flag unrent, — the flag of our glory 
and commemoration, waving on mast-head, steeple, and 
highland — Ave may come together and walk hand in 
hand, thoughtful, admiring, through these galleries of 
civil greatness ; when we may own together the spell 
of one hour of our history u^^on us all ; when faults 
may be forgotten, kindnesses revived, virtues remem- 
bered and sketched unblamed; when the arrogance 
of reform, the excesses of reform, the strifes of par- 
ties, the rivalries of regions, shall give place to a 
wider, warmer, and juster sentiment; when, turning 
from the corners and dark places of offensiveness, 
if such the candle lighted by malignity, or envy, or 



ADDRESS ON THE FOURTH OF JULY. 481 

censoriousness, or truth, has revealed anywhere, — 
when, turning from these, we may go up together to 
the serene and secret mountain-top, and there pause, 
and there unite in the reverent exclamation and in 
the exultant pra3^er, " How beautiful at last are thy 
tabernacles ! What people at last is like unto thee ! 
Peace be within thy palaces, and joy within thy 
gates ! The high places are thine, and there shalt 
thou stand proudly, and innocently, and securely." 

Happy, if such a day shall not be desecrated by our 
service ! Happy, if for us that descending sun shall 
look out on a more loving, more elevated, more 
united America ! These, no less, no narrower, be 
the aims of our celebration. These always were the 
true aims of this celebration. In its origin, a recital 
or defence of the grounds and principles of the Revo- 
lution, now demanding and permitting no defence, all 
taken for granted, and all had by heart ; then some- 
times wasted in a parade of vain-glor}^, cheap and 
vulgar, sometimes profaned, by the attack and repulse 
of partisan and local rhetoricians ; its great work, its 
distinctive character, and its chief lessons, remain and 
vindicate themselves, and will do so while the eye of 
the fighting or the dying shall yet read on the stain- 
less, ample folds the superscription blazing still in 
light, " Liberty and Union, now and for ever, one and 
inseparable." 

I have wished, therefore, as it was my duty, in 
doing myself the honor to join you in this act, to 
give some direction to your thoughts and feelings, 
suited at once to the nation's holiday, and seasonable 
and useful in itself. How difBcult this may be, I 
know. To try, however, to try to do any thing, is 

31 



482 ADDRESS ON THE FOURTH OF JULY. 

easy, and it is American also. Your candor will 
make it doubly easy, and to your candor I commit 
mj^self. 

The birthday of a nation, old or young, and cer- 
tainl}^ if young, is a time to think of the means of 
keeping alive the nation. T do not mean to say, 
however, because I do not believe, that there is but 
one wa}^ to this, the direct and the didactic. For at 
last it is the spirit of the day which we would cherish. 
It is our great annual national love-feast which we 
keep ; and if we rise from it witli hearts larger, beat- 
ing fuller, with feeling purer and warmer for America, 
what signifies it hoAV frugally, or hoAV richly, or how 
it was spread ; or whether it was a strain on the 
organ, the trumpet tones of the Declaration, the 
prayer of the good man, the sympathy of the hour, 
or what it was, which wrought to that end ? 

I do not, therefore, say that such an anniversary is 
not a time for thanksgiving to God, for gratitude to 
men, the living and the dead, for tears and thoughts 
too deep for tears, for eulogy, for exultation, for all 
the memories and for all the contrasts which soften 
and lift up the general mind. I do not say, for ex- 
ample, that to dwell on that one image of progress 
which is our history ; that image so grand, so daz- 
zling, so constant ; that stream now flowing so far 
and swelling into so immense a flood, but which burst 
out a small, choked, uncertain spring from the ground 
at first ; that transition from the Rock at Plymouth, 
from the unfortified peninsula at Jamestown, to this 
America which lays a hand on both the oceans, — 
from that heroic yet feeble folk whose allowance to a 
man by the day was five kernels of corn, for three 



ADDRESS ON THE FOURTH OF JULY. 483 

months no corn, or a piece of fish, or a moulded 
remainder biscuit, or a limb of a wild bird ; to whom 
a drought in spring was a fear and a judgment, and 
a call for humiliation before God; who held their 
breath when a flight of arrows or a war-cry broke the 
innocent sleep or startled the brave watching, — from 
that handful, and that want, to these millions, whose 
area is a continent, whose harvests might load the 
board of famishing nations, for whom a world in arms 
has no terror; — to trace the long series of causes 
which connected these two contrasted conditions, the 
Providences 'which ordained and guided a growth so 
stupendous ; the dominant race, sober, earnest, con- 
structive, — changed, but not degenerate here ; the 
influx of other races, assimilating, eloquent, and 
brave ; the fusion of all into a new one ; the sweet 
stimulations of liberty; the removal by the whole 
v/idth of oceans from the establishments of Europe, 
shaken, tyrannical, or burdened ; the healthful virgin 
world ; the universal progress of reason and art, — 
universal as civilization ; the aspect of revolutions 
on the human jnind ; the expansion of discovery and 
trade ; the developing sentiment of independence ; 
the needful baptism, of wars; the brave men, the 
wise men ; the Constitution, the Union ; the national 
life and the feeling of union which have grown with 
our growth and strengthened with our strength, — I 
do not say that meditations such as these might not 
teach or deepen the lesson of the day. All these 
things, so holy and beautiful, all things American, 
may afford certainly the means to keep America alive. 
That vast panorama unrolled by our general history, 
or unrolling; that eulogy, so just, so fervent, so 



484 ADDRESS ON THE FOURTH OF JULY. 

splendid, so approved ; that electric, seasonable mem- 
ory of Washington ; that purchase and that dedica- 
tion of the dwelling and the tomb, the work of 
woman and of the orator of the age : that record of 
his generals, that visit to battle-fields ; that reverent 
wiping away of dust from great urns ; that specula- 
tion, that dream of her past, present, and future ; 
every ship builded on lake or ocean ; every treaty 
concluded ; every acre of territory annexed ; every 
cannon cast ; every machine invented ; every mile of 
new railroad and telegraph undertaken ; every dollar 
added to the aggregate of national or individual 
wealth, — these all, as subjects of thought, as motives 
to pride and care, as teachers of wisdom, as agencies 
for probable good, may work, may insure, that earthly 
immortality of love and glory for which this celebra- 
tion was ordained. 

My way, however, shall be less ambitious and less 
indirect. Think, then, for a moment, on AmericAx^ 
NATIONALITY itself ; the outward national life and 
the inward national sentiment. Think on this ; its 
nature, and some of its conditions, aaid some of its 
ethics, — I would say, too, some of its dangers, but 
there shall be no expression of evil omen in this stage 
of the discourse; and to-day, at least, the word is 
safety, or hope. 

To know the nature of American nationality, ex- 
amine it first by contrast, and then examine it in 
itself. 

In some of the elemental characteristics of political 
opinion, the American people are one. These they 
can no more renounce for substance than the highest 
summit of the highest of the White Hills, than the 



ADDRESS ON THE FOURTH OF JULY. 485 

peak of the Alleghanies, than the Rocky Mountains 
can bow and cast themselves into the sea. Throuofh 
all their history, from the dawn of the colonial life 
to the brightness of this rising, they have spoken 
them, they have written them, they have acted them, 
they have run over with them. In all stages, in all 
agonies, through all report, good and evil, — some 
learning from the golden times of ancient and medi- 
aeval freedom, Greece and Italy and Geneva, from 
Aristotle, from Cicero and Bodinus, and Machiavel 
and Calvin ; or later, from Harrington and Sydney 
and Rousseau ; some learning, all reinforcing it di- 
rectly from nature and nature's God, — all have held 
and felt that every man vv\as equal to every other 
man ; that every man had a right to life, liberty, and 
the pursuit of happiness, and a conscience unfettered ; 
that the people were the source of power, and the 
good of the people was the political object of society 
itself. This creed, so grand, so broad, — in its gen- 
eral and duly qualified terms, so true, — planted the 
colonies, led them through the desert and the sea of 
ante-revolutionary life, rallied them all together to 
resist the attacks of a king and a minister, sharpened 
and pointed the bayonets of all their battles, burst 
forth from a million lips, beamed in a million eyes, 
burned in a million bosoms, sounded out in their 
revolutionary eloquence of fire and in the Declara- 
tion, awoke the thunders and gleamed in the light- 
ning of the deathless words of Otis, Henry, and 
Adams, was graved for ever on the general mind by 
the pen of Jefferson and Paine, survived the excite- 
ments of war and the necessities of order, penetrated 
and tinged all our constitutional composition and pol- 



486 ADDEESS ON THE FOURTH OF JULY. 

icy, and all our party organizations and nomenclature, 
and stands to-day, radiant, defiant, jocund, tiptoe, on 
the summits of our greatness, one authoritative and 
louder proclamation to humanity by Freedom, the 
guardian and the avenger. 

But in some traits of our politics we are not one. 
In some traits we differ from one another, and we 
change from ourselves. You may say these are sub- 
ordinate, executory, instrumental traits. Let us not 
cavil about names, but find the essences of things. 
Our object is to know the nature of American nation- 
aUty, and we are attempting to do so, first, by con- 
trasting it with its antagonisms. 

There are two great existences, then, in our civil 
life, which have this in common, though they have 
nothing else in common, that they may come in con- 
flict with the nationality which I describe ; one of 
them constant in its operation, constitutional, health- 
ful, auxiliary, even ; the other rarer, illegitimate, 
abnormal, terrible ; one of them a force under law ; 
the other a violence and a phenomenon above law 
and against law. 

It is first the capital peculiarity of our system, now 
a commonplace in our politics, that the affections 
which we give to countr}^ we give to a divided 
object, the States in which we live and the Union by 
which we are enfolded. We serve two masters. Our 
hearts own two loves. We live in two countries at 
once, and are commanded to be capacious of both. 
How easy it is to reconcile these duties in theory ; 
how reciprocally, more than compatible, how helpful 
and independent they are in theory ; how in this 
respect our system's difference makes our system's 



I 



ADDRESS ON THE FOURTH OF JUL\. 487 

peace, and from these blended colors, and this action 
and counteraction, how marvellous a beaut}^, and how 
grand a harmony we draw out, you all know. Prac- 
tically you know, too, the adjustment has not been 
quite so simple. How the Constitution attemjDts it is 
plain enough. There it is ; litera scripta manet, and 
heaven and earth shall pass before one jot or one tittle 
of that Scripture shall fail of fulfilment. So we all 
say, and yet how men have divided on it. How they 
divided in the great convention itself, and in the very 
presence of Washington. How the people divided on 
it. How it has created parties, lost and given power, 
bestowed great reputations and taken them away, and 
colored and shaken the universal course of our public 
life ! But have you ever considered that iii the nature 
of things this must be so? Have you ever considered 
that it was a federative system we had to adopt, and 
that in such a system a conflict of head and members is 
in some form and to some extent a result of course ? 
There the States were when we became a nation. 
There they have been for one hundred and fifty 
years — for one hundred and seventy years. Some 
power, it was agreed on all hands, we must delegate 
to the new government. Of some thunder, some 
insignia, some beams, some means of kindling pride, 
winning gratitude, attracting honor, love, obedience, 
friends, all men knew they must be bereaved, and 
they were so. But when this was done, there were 
the States still. In the scheme of every statesman 
they remained a component part, unannihilated, 
indestructible. In the scheme of the Constitution, 
of compromise itself, they remained a component 
part, indestructible. In tlie theories of all publicists 



488 ADDRESS ON THE FOURTH OF JULY. 

and all speculators they were retained, and they were 
valued for it, to hinder and to disarm that central- 
ization which had been found to be the danger and 
the w^eakness of federal liberty. And then when you 
bear in mind that they are sovereignties, quasi^ but 
sovereignties still ; that one of the most dread and 
transcendent prerogatives of sovereignties, the pre- 
rogative to take life and liberty for crime, is theirs 
without dispute ; that in the theories of some schools 
they may claim to be parties to the great compact, 
and as such may, and that any of them may, secede 
from that compact when by their corporate judgment 
they deem it to be broken fundamentally by the 
others, and that from such a judgment there is no 
appeal to a common peaceful umpire ; that in the 
theories of some schools they may call out their young 
men and their old men under the pains of death to 
defy the sword point of the federal arm ; that they 
can pour around even the gallows and the tomb of 
him who died for treason to the Union, honor, opin- 
ion, tears, and thus sustain the last untimely hour, 
and soothe the disembodied, complaining shade ; that 
every one, by name, by line of boundary, by jurisdic- 
tion, is distinct from every other, and every one from 
the nation ; that within their inviolate borders lie our 
farms, our homes, our meeting-houses, our graves ; 
that their laws, their courts, their militia, their 
police, to so vast an extent protect our persons from 
violence, and our houses from plunder ; that their 
heaven ripens our harvests ; their schools form our 
children's mental and moral nature ; their charities 
or their taxes feed our poor ; their hospitals cure or 
shelter our insane ; that their image, their opinions, 



ADDRESS ON THE FOURTH OF JULY. 48^ 

their literature, their morality are around us ever, a 
presence, a monument, an atmosphere — when you 
consider this you feel how practical and how inevita- 
ble is that antagonism to a single national life, and how 
true it is that we "buy all our blessings at a price." 

But there is another antagonism to such a national 
life, less constant, less legitimate, less compensated, 
more terrible, to which I must refer, — not for rep- 
robation, not for warning, not even for grief, but 
that Ave may know by contrast nationality itself, — 
and that is, the element of sections. This, too, is 
old ; older than the States, old as the Colonies, old 
as the churches that planted them, old as Jamestown, 
old as Pl3'mouth. A thousand forms disguise and 
express it, and in all of them it is hideous. Candi- 
diim sell nigrum hoc tu Homane caveto. Black or 
white, as you are Americans, dread it, shun it ! 
Springing from many causes and fed by many stimu- 
lations ; springing from that diversity of climate, 
business, institutions, accomplishment, and morality, 
which comes of our greatness, and compels and should 
constitute our order and our agreement, but which 
only makes their difficulty and their merit; from that 
self-love and self-preference which are their own 
standard, exclusive, intolerant, and censorious of 
what is wise and holy ; from the fear of ignorance, 
the jealousy of ignorance, the narrowness of igno- 
rance ; from incapacity to abstract, combine, and 
grasp a complex and various object, and thus rise to 
the dignity of concession and forbearance and com- 
promise ; from the frame of our civil polity, the 
necessities of our public life and the nature of our 
ambition, which forces all men not great men, — the 



490 ADDRESS ON THE FOURTH OF JULY. 

minister in his parish, the politician on the stump on 
election clay, the editor of the party newspaper, — to 
take his rise or his patronage from an intense local 
opinion, and therefore to do his best to create or rein- 
force it ; from our federative government ; from our 
good traits, bad traits, and foolish traits ; from that 
vain and vulgar hankering for European reputation 
and respect for European opinion, which forgets that 
one may know Aristophanes, and Geography, and 
the Cosmical Unity and Telluric influences, and the 
smaller morals of life, and all the sounding preten- 
sions of philanthropy, and yet not know America ; 
from that philosophy, falsel}^ so called, which boasts 
emptily of progress, renounces traditions, denies God 
and worships itself; from an arrogant and flashy 
literature which mistakes a new phrase for a new 
thought, and old nonsense for new truth, and is glad 
to exchange for the fame of drawling-rooms and par- 
lor windows, and the side-lights of a car in motion, 
the approval of time and the world ; from philan- 
thropy which is short-sighted, impatient and spas- 
modic, and cannot be made to appreciate that its 
grandest and surest agent, in His eye whose lifetime 
is Eternity, and whose periods are ages, is a nation 
and a sober public opinion, and a safe and silent 
advancement, reforming by time ; from that spirit 
which would rule or ruin, and would reign in hell 
rather than serve in heaven ; springing from these 
causes and stimulated thus, there is an element of 
regions antagonistic to nationality. Always I have 
said, there was one ; ahvays there will be. It lifted 
its shriek sometimes even above the silver clarion 
tone that called millions to unite for independence. 



ADDRESS ON THE FOURTH OF JULY. 491 

It resisted the nomination of Washington to com- 
mand our armies ; made his new levies hate one 
another; assisted the caballings of Gates and Con- 
way; mocked his retreats, and threw its damp 
passing cloud for a moment over his exceeding 
gior}- ; opposed the adoption of any constitution ; 
and perverted by construction and denounced as a 
covenant with hell the actual Constitution when it 
was adopted ; brought into our vocabulary and dis- 
cussions the hateful and ill-omened words North and 
South, Atlantic and Western, which the grave warn- 
ings of the Farewell Address expose and rebuke ; 
transformed the floor of congress into a battle-field 
of contending local policy ; convened its conventions 
at Abbeville and Hartford ; rent asunder conferences 
and synods ; turned stated assemblies of grave clergy- 
men and grave laymen into shows of gladiators or of 
the beasts of gladiators ; checked the holy effort of 
missions, and set back the shadow on the dial-plate 
of a certain amelioration and ultimate probable eman- 
cipation, many degrees. Some might say it culmi- 
nated later in an enterprise even more daring still ; 
but others might deny it. The ashes upon that fire 
are not yet cold, and we will not tread upon them. 
But all will unite in prayer to Almighty God that we 
miiy never see, nor our children, nor their children 
to the thousandth generation may ever see it culmi- 
nate in a Geographical party, banded to elect a 
Geographical President, and inaugurate a Geograph- 
ical policy. 

" Take any shape but that, and thou art welcome ! " 
But now, by the side of this and all antagonisms, 
higher than they, stronger than they, there rises 



492 ADDRESS ON THE FOURTH OF JULY. 

colossal the fine sweet spirit of nationality, the 
nationality of America ! See there the pillar of fire 
which God has kindled and lifted and moved for onr 
hosts and our ages. Gaze on that, worship that, 
worship the highest in that. Between that light and 
our eyes a cloud for a time may seem to gather ; 
chariots, armed men on foot, the troops of kings may 
march on us, and our fears may make us for a 
moment turn from it ; a sea may spread before us, 
and waves seem to hedge us up ; dark idolatries may 
alienate some hearts for a season from that worship ; 
revolt, rebellion, may break out in the camp, and the 
waters of our springs may run bitter to the taste 
and mock it ; between us and that Canaan a great 
river may seem to be rolling ; but beneath that high 
guidance our way is onward, ever onward ; those 
waters shall part, and stand on either hand in heaps ; 
that idolatry shall repent ; that rebellion shall be 
crushed ; that stream shall be sweetened ; that over- 
flowing river shall be passed on foot dry shod, in 
harvest time ; and from that promised land of flocks, 
fields, tents, mountains, coasts and ships, from North 
and South, and East and West, there shall swell one 
cry yet, of victory, peace, and thanksgiving ! 

But we were seeking the nature of the spirit of na- 
tionality, and we pass in this inquiry from contrast to 
analysis. You may call it, subjectively regarded, a 
mode of contemplating the nation in its essence, and 
so far it is an intellectual conception, and you may call 
it a feeling, towards the nation thus contemplated, and 
so far it is an emotion. In the intellectual exercise 
it contemplates the nation as it is one, and as it is 
distinguished from all other nations, and in the emo- 



ADDRESS ON THE FOURTH OF JULY. 493 

tional exercise it loves it, and is proud of it as thus 
it is contemplated. This you may call its ultimate 
analysis. But how much more is included in it! 
How much flows from it ! How cold and inadequate 
is such a description, if we leave it there ! Think of 
it first as a state of consciousness, as a spring of feel- 
ing, as a motive to exertion, as blessing your country, 
and as reacting on you. Think of it as it fills joiw 
mind and quickens your heart, and as it fills the mind 
and quickens the heart of millions around you. In- 
stantly, under such an influence, you ascend above 
the smoke and stir of this small local strife ; you 
tread upon, the high places of the earth and of his- 
tory ; you think and feel as an American fot America ; 
her power, her eminence, her consideration, her honor, 
are yours ; your competitors, like hers, are kings ; 
your home, like hers, is the world ; your path, like 
hers, is on the highway of empires ; our charge, her 
charge, is of generations and ages ; your record, her 
record, is of treaties, battles, voyages, beneath all the 
constellations ; her image, one, immortal, golden, rises 
on your eye as our western star at evening rises on 
the traveller from his home ; no lowering cloud, no 
angry river, no lingering spring, no broken crevasse, 
no inundated city or plantation, no tracts of sand, 
arid and burning, on that surface, but all blended 
and softened into one beam of kindred rays, the 
image, harbinger, and promise of love, liope, and a 
brighter day ! 

Think of it next, as an active virtue. Is not all 
history a recital of the achievements of nationality, 
and an exponent of its historical and imperial nature? 
Even under systems far less perfect, and influences 



494 ADDRESS ON THE FOURTH OF JULY. 

far less auspicious than ours, has it not lifted itself 
up for a time above all things meaner, vindicating 
itself b}' action, by the sublimity of a brave daring, 
successful or unsuccessful, by the sublimity of a 
working hope? How loose, for example, and how 
perfidious, was that union of the States of Greece in 
all times ! How distinct were the nations of Attica, 
of Laconia, of Thessaly, of Boeotia, and how utterly 
insufficient the oracle, the Amphictyonic Assembly, 
the games, the great first epic, to restrain Athens 
and Sparta and Thebes from contending, by diplo- 
macy, by fraud, by battle, for the mastery ! And 
yet even in the historical age, when the storm of 
Eastern invasion swept that blue sea, and those 
laughing islands, and iron-bound coast, over, above, 
grander and more useful than the fear and policy 
which counselled temporary union, — were there not 
some, were there not many, on whose perturbed and 
towering motives came the thought of that great, 
common, Greek name ; that race, kindred at last, 
though policy, though mines of marble, though ages 
had parted them, — that golden, ancient, polished 
speech, that inherited ancestral glory, that national 
Olympus, that inviolated, sterile, and separate earth, 
that fame of camps, that fire of camps which put out 
the ancient life of the Troy of Asia ; and was it not 
such memories as these that burn and revel in the 
pages of Herodotus ? Did not Sparta and Athens 
hate one another and fight one another habitually, 
and yet when those Lacedaemonian levies gazed so 
steadfastly on the faces of the fallen at Marathon, 
did they not give Greek tears to Athens and Greek 
curses to Persia, and in the hour of Platcea did they 
not stand together against the barbarian? 



ADDRESS ON THE FOURTH OF JULY. 495 

What else formed the secret of the brief spell of 
Rienzi's power, and burned and sparkled in the 
poetry and rhetoric of his friend Petrarch, and 
soothed the dark hour of the grander soul of Machi- 
avel, loathing that Italy, and recalling that other 
day Avhen " eight hundred thousand men sprang to 
arms at the rumor of a Gallic invasion " ? 

Is not Prussia afraid of Austria, and Saxony of 
Bavaria, and Frankfort jealous of Dresden, and so 
through the twenty-seven or eight or thirty States, 
great and small ; and jet the dear, common father- 
land, the old German tongue, the legend of Hermann, 
the native and titular Rhine flowing rapid, deep, and 
majestic, like the life of a hero of antiquity, — do not 
these spectacles and these traditions sometimes wake 
the nationality of Germany to action, as well as to 
life and hope ? 

But if you would contemplate nationality as an 
active virtue, look around you. Is not our own his- 
tory one witness and one record of what it can do? 
This day and all which it stands for, — did it not 
give us these ? This glory of the fields of that war, 
this eloquence of that revolution, this wide one sheet 
of flame which wrapped tyrant and tyranny and 
swept all that escaped from it away, for ever and 
for ever ; the courage to fight, to retreat, to rally, to 
advance, to guard the young flag by the 3'oung arm 
and the young heart's blood, to hold up and hold on 
till the magnificent consummation crowned the work, 
— were not all these imparted as inspired by this 
imperial sentiment?- Has it not here begun the 
master-work of man, the creation of a national life? 
Did it not call out that prodigious development of 



496 ADDRESS ON THE FOURTH OF JULY. 

wisdom, the wisdom of constructiveness which illus- 
trated the years after the war, and the framing and 
adopting of the Constitution? Has it not, in the 
general, contributed to the administering of that 
government wisely and well since ? Look at it ! It 
has kindled us to no aims of conquest. It has in- 
volved us in no entangling alliances. It has kept 
our neutrality dignified and just. The victories of 
peace have been our prized victories. But the larger 
and truer grandeur of the nations, for which they are 
created and for which they must, one day, before some 
tribunal give account, what a measure of these it 
has enabled us already to fulfil ! It has lifted us to 
the throne, and has set on our brow the name of the 
great Republic. It has taught us to demand nothing 
wrong, and to submit to nothing wrong ; it has made 
our diplomacy sagacious, wary, and accomplished ; it 
has opened the iron gate of the mountain, and planted 
our ensign on the great, tranquil sea ; it has made 
the desert to bud and blossom as the rose ; it has 
quickened to life the giant brood of useful arts ; it 
has whitened lake and ocean with the sails of a dar- 
ing, new, and lawful trade ; it has extended to exiles, 
flying as clouds, the asylum of our better liberty ; it 
has kept us at rest within all our borders ; it has re- 
pressed without blood the intemperance of local in- 
subordination ; it has scattered the seeds of liberty, 
under law and under order, broadcast ; it has seen 
and helped American feeling to swell into a fuller 
flood ; from many a field and many a deck, though it 
seeks not war, makes not war, and fears not war, 
it has borne the radiant flag all unstained ; it has 
opened our age of lettered glory ; it has opened and 
honored the age of the industry of the people ! 



ADDRESS ON THE FOURTH OF JULY. 497 

We have done with the nature of American nation- 
ality, with its contrasts, analysis, and fruits. I have 
less pleasure to remind you that it has conditions 
also, and ethics. And wliat are some of these ? 
This is our next consideration. 

And the first of these is that this national existence 
is, to an extraordinary degree, not a growth, but a 
production ; that it has origin in the will and the 
reason, and that the will and the reason must keep it 
alive, or it can bear no life. I do not forget that a 
power above man's power, a wisdom above man's wis- 
dom, a reason above man's reason, may be traced with- 
out the presumptuousness of fanaticism in the fortunes 
of America. I do not forget that God has been in our 
histor}^ Beyond that dazzling progress of art, society, 
thought, which is of His ordaining, although it may 
seem to a false philosophy a fatal and inevitable flow 
under law, — beyond this I do not forget that there 
have been, and there may be again, interpositions, 
providential, exceptional, and direct, of that Supreme 
Agency without which no sparrow falleth. That con- 
dition of mind and of opinion in Europe, and more than 
anywhere else, in England, which marked the period 
of emigration, and bore flower, fruit, and seed after 
its kind in the new world; that conflict and upheaval 
and fermenting in the age of Charles the First, and 
th€ Long Parliament, and Cromwell, and Milton, — 
violated nature asserting herself ; that disappearance 
of the old races here, wasting so mysteriously and so 
seasonably, — that drear death giving place as in 
nature to a better life ; that long colonial growth in 
shade and storm and neglect, sheltered imperfectly 
by our relations to the mother country, and not yet 

32 



498 ADDRESS ON THE FOURTH OF JULY. 

exposed to the tempest and lightning of the high 
places of political independence; burdened and poor, 
but yet evolving, germinant, prophetic ; that insane 
common attack of one tyranny on so many charters ; 
that succession of incompetent English commanders 
and English tactics against us in the war ; that one 
soul breathed in a moment into a continent; the 
Declaration so timely, and so full of tone ; the name, 
the services, the influence of Washington, — these 
are " parts of His ways," and we may understand and 
adore them. 

I do not forget either that in the great first step 
we had to take — that difficulty so stupendous, of 
beginning to mould the colonies into a nation, to 
overcome the prejudices of habit and ignorance, the 
petty cavils of the petty, the envy, the jealousy, the 
ambition, the fears of great men and little men ; to 
take away partition walls, roll away provincial flags 
and hush provincial drums, and give to the young 
Republic E Plurihus Unum^ to set out onward and 
upward on her Zodiac path, — I do not forget that in 
this, too, there were helps of circumstances for which 
no philosophy and no pride can make us unthankful. 

Take one. Have you ever considered, speculating 
on the m^^steries of our national being, how providen- 
tially the colonial life itself, in one respect, qualified 
for Union, and how providentially it came to pass 
that independence and nationality were born in one 
day ? Suppose that, from the times when they were 
planted respectively, these colonies had been inde- 
pendent of one another, and of every one, — suppose 
this had been so for one hundred and fifty years, for 
one hundred and seventy years ; that in the eye of 



ADDRESS ON THE FOURTH OF JULY. 499 

public law they had through all that time ranked 
with England, with France ; , that through all that 
time they had made war, concluded peace, negotiated 
treaties of commerce and of alliance, received and 
sent ministers, coined money, superintended trade, 
" done all other things which independent States of 
right may do ; " and then that a single foreign power 
had souoht to reduce them. I do not say that that 
power would have reduced them. I do not say that 
necessity, that prudence, which is civil necessity, 
would not have taught them to assist one another, 
and that in one sense, and that a just one, they would 
have fought and triumphed together. But when that 
victory was won and the cloud rolled off seaward, 
would these victors have flown quite so easily into a 
common embrace and become a single people ? This 
long antecedent several independence ; this long 
antecedent national life, — would it not have indu- 
rated them and separated them? These old high 
actions and high passions flowing diverse ; these 
opposed banners of old fields ; this music of hostile 
marches ; these memories of an unshared past ; this 
history of a glory in which one only had part, — do 
you think they could have been melted, softened, 
and beaten quite so easily into the unit}^ of a common 
life ? Might not the world have seen here, instead, 
another Attica, and Achaia and Lacedaemonia, and 
Messina, and Naples and Florence and Saxony? 
Did not that colonial life, in its nature — that long 
winter and lingering spring — discipline and prepare 
men for the future of their civil life, as an April 
snow enriches the earth it seems to bury? Did it 
not keep back the growths which might otherwise 



500 ADDRESS ON THE FOURTH OF JULY. 

have shot up into impracticable ranknesses and diver- 
sities? Did it not divert men from themselves to 
one another — from Massachusetts and Virginia and 
New York, to the forming or the possible America? 
Instead of stunting and enfeebling, did it not enlarge 
and strengthen? And when all that host flocked 
together, to taste together the first waters of inde- 
pendent life, and one high, common, proud feeling 
pervaded their ranks, lifted up all hearts, softened all 
hearts at once — and a Rhode Island General was 
seen to fight at the Eutaws ; and a New Yorker, or 
one well beloved of Massachusetts, at Saratoga ; and 
a Virginian to guide the common war, and a united 
army to win the victory for all — was not the transi- 
tion, in a moment so sublime, more natural, less 
violent, more easy to the transcendent conception of 
nationality itself ? 

I do not deny, too, that some things subordinate 
and executory are a little easier than at first; that 
the friction of the machine is less somewhat ; that 
mere administration has grown simpler ; that organ- 
izations have been effected which may move of them- 
selves ; that departments have been created and set 
going, which can go alone ; that the Constitution has 
been construed authoritatively ; that a course, a 
routine has been established in which things — some 
things — may go on as now, without your thought or 
mind. Bold he is, moreover, I admit, not wise, who 
would undertake to determine what chance, or what 
Providence may do, and what man may do in the 
sustentation of national life. But remember, that is 
a false philosophy and that is no religion which 
absolves from duty. That is impiety which boasts of 



ADDRESS ON THE FOURTH OF JULY. 501 

a will of God, and forgets the business of man. Will 
and reason created, Avill and reason must keep. 
Every day, still, we are in committee of the whole on 
the question of the Constitution or no Constitution. 
Eternal vigilance is the condition of union, as they 
say it is of liberty. I have heard that if the same 
Omnipotence which formed the universe at first 
should suspend its care for a day, primeval chaos 
were come again. Dare we risk such a speculation 
in politics and act on it? Consider how new is this 
America of 3'ours ! Some there are yet alive who 
saw this infant rocked in the cradle. Some there are 
yet alive who beheld the first inauguration of Wash- 
ington ; many that felt how the tidings of his death 
smote on the general heart. Some now alive saw the 
deep broad trench first excavated, the stone drawn 
from the mountain-side, the mortar mingled, the 
Cyclopean foundation laid, the tears, the anthems, the 
thanksgiving of the dedication day. That unknown, 
therefore magnified, therefore magnificent original ; 
that august tradition of a mixed human and Divine ; 
that hidden fountain ; the long, half-hidden flow 
glancing uncertain and infrequent through the open- 
ing of the old forest, spreading out, at last, after 
leagues, after centuries, into the clear daylight of 
history; the authoritative prescription; the legend, 
the fable, the tones of uncertain harps, the acquies- 
cence of generations, rising in a long line to life as 
to a gift, — where for us are they ? On all this 
architecture of utility and reason, where has time 
laid a finger? What angularity has it rounded; 
what stone has it covered with moss ; on what salient 
or what pendant coigne of vantage has it built its 



502 ADDRESS ON THE FOURTH OF JULY. 

riest ; on what deformity has its moonlight and twi- 
light fallen ? What enables us then to withhold for 
a moment the sustaining hand ? The counsel of phi- 
losoph}^ and history, of Cicero, of Machiavel, of Mon- 
tesquieu, to turn to the first principles, to reproduce 
and reconstruct the ancient freedom, the masculine 
virtues, the plain wisdom of the original — is it not 
seasonable counsel eminently for you? Remember, 
your reason, your will, may keep, must keep what 
reason and will builded. Yours is the responsibility, 
3^ours, to country, to man, unshared, unconcealed. 

I do not know that I need to say next that such a 
spirit of nationality reposing on will and reason, or, 
however produced, not spontaneous, and therefore to 
some extent artificial, demands a specific culture to 
develop it and to make it intense, sure and constant. 
I need not say this, because it is so plain ; but it is 
important as well as plain. There is a love of country 
which comes uncalled for, one knows not how. It 
comes in with the very air, the eye, the ear, the 
instincts, the first taste of the mother's milk, the 
first beatings of the heart. The faces of brothers 
and sisters, and the loved father and mother, — the 
laugh of playmates, the old willow-tree, and well, 
and. school-house, the bees at work in the spring, the 
note of the robin at evening, the lullaby, the cows 
coming home, the singing-book, the catechism, the 
visits of neighbors, the general training, — all things 
which make childhood happy, begin it ; and then as 
the age of the passions and the age of the reason 
draw on, and love and the sense of home and secu- 
rity and property under law, come to life ; — and as 
the story goes round, and as the book or the news- 



ADDRESS ON THE FOURTH OF JULY- 503 

paper relates the less favored lots of other lands, and 
the public and the private sense of a man is forming 
and formed, there is a t3^pe of patriotism already. 
Thus they had imbibed it who stood that charge at 
Concord, and they who hung deadly on the retreat, 
and they who threw up the hasty and imperfect 
redoubt on Bunker Hill by night, set on it the blood- 
red provincial flag, and passed so calmly with Prescott 
and Putnam and Warren through the experiences 
of the first fire. 

But now to direct this spontaneous sentiment of 
hearts to the Union, to raise it high, to make it broad 
and deep, to instruct it, to educate it, is in some 
things harder, some things easier ; but it may be 
done ; it must be done. She, too, has her spectacles ; 
she, too, has her great names ; she, too, has her food 
for patriotism, for childhood, for man. " Americans," 
said an orator of France, " begin with the infant in 
the cradle. Let the first word he lisps be Washing- 
ton." Plang on his neck on that birthday, and that 
day of his death at Mount Vernon, the Medal ot 
Congress, by its dark ribbon ; tell him the story of 
the flag, as it passes glittering along the road ; bid 
him listen to that plain, old-fashioned, stirring music 
of the Union ; lead him when school is out at even- 
ing to the grave of his great-grandfather, the old sol- 
dier of the war ; bid him, like Hannibal, at nine years 
old, lay the little hand on that Constitution and 
swear reverently to observe it ; lift him up and lift 
yourselves up to the height of American feeling ; 
open to him, and think for yourselves, on the rela- 
tion of America to the States ; show him upon the 
map the area to which she has extended herself ; the 



504 ADDRESS ON THE FOURTH OF JULY. 

climates that come into the number of her months i 
the silver paths of her trade, wide as the world ; tell 
him of her contributions to humanity, and her pro- 
tests for free government ; keep with him the glad 
and solemn feasts of her appointment ; bury her 
great names in his heart, and into 3'our hearts ; con- 
template habitually, lovingly, intelligently, this grand 
abstraction, this vast reality of good ; and such an 
institution may do somewhat to transform this sur- 
passing beauty into a national life, which shall last 
while sun and moon endure. 

But there is another condition of our nationality 
of which I must say something, and that is that it 
rests on compromise. America, the Constitution, 
practicable policy, all of it, are a compromise. Our 
public is possible — it can draw its breath for a day 
— onl}^ b}^ compromise. 

There is a cant of shallowness and fanaticism which 
misunderstands and denies this. There is a distem- 
pered and ambitious morality which says civil pru- 
dence is no virtue. There is a philanthrop}^, — so 
it calls itself, — pedantry, arrogance, folly, cruelty, 
impiousness, I call it, fit enough for a pulpit, totally 
unlit for a people ; fit enough for a preacher, totally 
unfit for a statesman ; — which, confounding large 
things with little things, ends with means, subordi- 
nate ends with chief ends, one man's sphere of re- 
sponsibility with another man's sphere of responsi- 
bility, seed-time with harvest, one science with 
another science, one truth with another truth, one 
jurisdiction with another jurisdiction, the span-long 
day of life with the duration of States, generals with 
universals, the principle with the practice, the Anglo- 



ADDRESS ON THE FOURTH OF JULY. 505 

Celtic-Saxon of America with the pavers of Paris, 
cutting clown the half-grown tree to snatch the un- 
ripe fruit — there is a philanthropy which scolds at 
this even, and calls it names. 

To such a sj^irit I have nothing to say, but I have 
something to say to you. It is remarked by a very 
leading writer of our times, Lord Macaulay, — enno- 
bled less by title than by genius and fame, — " that 
compromise is the essence of politics." That which 
every man of sense admits to be so true, as to have 
become a commonplace of all politics, is peculiarly 
true of our national politics. Our history is a record 
of compromises ; and this freedom and this glory 
attest their wisdom and bear their fruits. But can 
these compromises stand the higher test of morality ? 
Concessions for the sake of the nation ; concessions 
for what the general opinion of America has pro- 
nounced concessions for America ; concessions in 
measures; concessions in spirit for such an end; - 
are they a virtue ? 

I hope it is worth something, in the first place, that 
the judgment of civilization, collected from all its 
expression and all its exponents, has ranked conces- 
sion for the keeping and well-being of the nation, 
among the whiter virtues. Starting with the grand 
central sentiment that patriotism is the noblest prac- 
tical limitation of universal philanthropy, and re- 
serviug its enthusiasm, its tears, for the martyred 
patriot, and deeming his death the most glorious of 
deaths, it has given ever the first place to him whose 
firmness, wisdom, and moderation have built the 
State, and whose firmness, wisdom, and moderation 
keep the State. These traits it has stamped as virtues. 



506 ADDRESS ON THE FOURTH OF JULY. 

These traits it has stamped as great virtues. Poetry, 
art, histor}^, biography, the funeral discourse, the ut- 
terance of that judgment, how universally have they 
so stamped them ! He whose harp, they said, attracted 
and fused savage natures ; he who gave to his people, 
not the best government, but the best that they would 
bear ; he Avho by timely adaptations elevated an infe- 
rior class to equality with a superior class, and made 
two nations into one ; he whose tolerance and com- 
prehension put out the fires of persecution, and 
placed all opinions and religions on one plane before 
the law ; he Avhose healing counsels composed the 
distractions of a various empire, — he is the great 
good man of civilization. Ambition might have been 
his aim to some extent, but the result is a country, 
a power, a law. On that single title, it raised his 
statue, hung on it the garland that cannot die, kept 
his birthday by the firing of cannons, and ringing of 
bells, and processions, and thanks to God Almighty. 
He may not have been fortunate in war ; he may 
not have been foremost among men of genius ; but 
what Luxembourg, what Eugene, what Marlborough, 
heaped on his ashes such a monument, as the wise, 
just, cold, Dutch deliverer of England? What Gates, 
what Lee, what Alexander, what Napoleon, won 
such honor, such love, such sacred and warm-felt 
approval as our civil father, Washington? Does that 
judgment, the judgment of civilization, condemn De- 
mosthenes, who would have invited Persia to help 
against Macedon ; or Cicero, who praised and soothed 
the young Octavius, to win him from Antony ; or 
the Calvinist William, who invited the papal Austria 
to fight with him against Louis XIV.? Does it 



I 



ADDRESS ON THE FOURTH OF JULY. 507 

I 
dream of branding such an act as hypocrisy, or apos- 
tasy? Does it not recognize it rather as wisdom, 
patriotism, and virtue, masculine and intelligent? 
Does it not rather give him all honor and thanks, 
who could forego the sweets of revenge, rise above 
the cowardice of selfishness and the narrow memory 
of personal inapplicable antecedents, and for the love 
of Athens, of Rome, of England, of liberty, could 
magnanimously grasp the solid glory of great souls ? 

But this judgment of civilization, I maintain next, 
is a sound moral judgment. It is founded on a theory 
of duty which makes the highest utility to man the 
crrandest achievement of man. It thinks that it dis- 
cerns that the national life is the true useful human 
life. It thinks that it discerns that the greater in- 
cludes the less ; that beneath that order, that govern- 
ment, that law, that power, reform is easy and reform 
is safe, — reform of the man, reform of the nation. 
It ventures to hold that a nation is the grandest of 
the instrumentalities of morals and religion. It holds 
that under that wing, beneath that lightning, there 
is room, there is capacity, for humbly imitating His 
plan who sits in the circle of eternity, and with whom 
a thousand years are as one day ; room, motive, ca- 
pacity for labor, for culture, for preparation, for the 
preaching of the gospel of peace to all, for elevating by 
slow, sure, and quiet gradations down to its depths, 
down to its chains, society itself. Concession to keep 
such an agent is concession to promote such ends. 

Do you remember what a great moralist and a 
great man. Archbishop Whately, said on this subject 
in the House of Lords ? He was advocating conces- 
sion to Catholics ; and see how much stronger was 



508 ADDRESS ON THE FOURTH OF JULY. 

truth than the hatred of theolo^'ians. The bio^^ra- 
pher of Peel calls the speech a splendid piece of rea- 
soning ; and it decided the vote : — 

" So great is the outcry which it has been the 
fashion among some persons for several years past to 
raise against expediency^ that the very Avord has be- 
come almost an ill-omened sound. It seems to be 
thought by many a sufficient ground of condemna- 
tion of any legislator to say that he is guided by 
views of expediency. And some seem even to be 
ashamed of acknowledging that they are, in any 
degree, so guided. I, for one, however, am content 
to submit to the imputation of being a votary of ex- 
pediency. And Avhat is more, I do not see what 
right any one who is not so has to sit in Parliament, 
or to take any part in public affairs. Any one who 
may choose to acknowledge that the measures he 
opposes are expedient, or that those he recommends 
are inexpedient, ought manifestly to have no seat in 
a deliberative assembly, which is constituted for the 
express and sole purpose of considering what meas- 
ures are conducive to the 2^uhlic good ; — in other 
words, 'expedient.' I say, the ^public good,' because, 
of course, by ' expediency ' we mean, not that which 
may benefit some individual, or some party or class 
of men, at the expense of the public, but what con- 
duces to the good of the nation. Now this, it is 
evident, is the very object for which deliberative 
assemblies ar'e constituted. And so far is this from 
being regarded, by our Church at least, as sometliing 
at variance with religious duty, that we have a 
prayer specially appointed to be offered up during 
the sitting of the Houses of Parliament, that their 



ADDRESS ON THE FOURTH OF JULY. 509 

consultations may be ' directed and prospered for the 
safety^ honor^ and welfare of our sovereign and her 
dominions.' Now, if this be not the very definition 
of political expediency, let any one say Avhat is." 

I have no doubt, however, that this judgment of 
civilization rests in part on the difficulty and the 
rarity of the virtue which it praises. We prize the 
difficult and the rare because they are difficult and 
rare ; and when you consider how easy and how 
tempting it is to fall in with and float with the 
stream on which so many swim ; how easy is that 
broad road and how sweet that approved strain ; how 
easy and how tempting it is to please an assenting 
congregation, or circle of readers, or local public ; 
how easy and how tempting to compound for sins 
which an influential man " is not inclined to, by 
damning those he has no mind to ; " how easy to 
please those we see, and forget those out of sight; 
what courage, what love of truth are demanded to 
dissent ; how hard it is to rise to the vast and varied 
conception, and to the one idea, which grasps and 
adjusts all the ideas ; how easy it is for the little man 
to become great, the shallow man to become pro- 
found ; the coward out of danger to be brave ; the 
free-state man to be an anti-slavery man, and to 
write tracts which his friends alone read ; Avhen you 
think that even the laughter of fools and children 
and madmen, little ministers, little editors, and little 
politicians, can inflict the mosquito bite, not deep, 
but stinging ; — Avho wonders that the serener and 
the calmer judgment allots " to patient continuance 
in well doing," to resistance of the parts, to conten- 
tion for the whole, to counsels of moderation and 
concession, " glory, honor, and immortality " ? 



510 ADDRESS ON THE FOURTH OF JULY. 

" What nothing earthly gives or can destroy, 
The soul's calm sunshine, and the heartfelt joy." 

But this judgment of civilization is the judgment 
of religion too. You believe with the Bible, with 
Cicero, with the teachings of history, that God wills 
the national life. He Avills civilization, therefore 
society, therefore law, therefore government, there- 
fore nations. How do we know this ? Always, from 
the birth of the historical time, civilized man led the 
national life. Therein always the nature God has 
given him has swelled to all its perfection, and has 
rendered the worthiest praise to the Giver of the gift. 
He who wills the end wills the indispensable means; 
he wills the means which his teachers, nature and 
experience, have ascertained to be indispensable. 
Then he wills these means, concession, compromise, 
love, forbearance, help, because his teachers, nature 
and experience, have revealed them to be indispensa- 
ble. Then he wills our national life. Then he wills 
the spirit which made it and which keeps it. Do you 
dare to say, with President Davies, that you believe 
that Providence raised up that young man, Washing- 
ton, for some great public service, — with the specta- 
tor of that first inauguration, that you believe the 
Supreme Being looked down with complacency on 
that act, — with that Senate which thanked God that 
he had conducted to the tomb a fame whiter than it 
was brilliant ; and yet dare to say that the spirit of 
Washington ought not to be your spirit, his counsels 
your guide, his Farewell Address your scripture of 
political religion? But what does he say? I need 
not repeat it, for you have it by heart ; but what said 
a greater than he ? " Render unto Csesar the things 



ADDRESS ON THE FOURTH OF JULY. 511 

which are Csesar's." Render under Csesar the things 
that are C?esar's, and thus, to that extent, you " ren- 
der unto God the things which are God's." Be these 
words our answer and our defence. When they 
press us with the commonplaces of anti-shivery, be 
these words of wisdom our answer. Say to them, 
" Yes, I thank God I keep no shives. I am sorry 
there is one on earth ; I am sorry even that there is 
need of law, of subordination, of order, of govern- 
ment, of the discipline of the schools, of prisons, of 
the gallows ; I wonder at such a system of things ; 
piously I would reform it ; but beneath that same 
system I am an American citizen ; beneath that sys- 
tem, this country it is my post to keep ; while I keep 
her there is hope for all men, for the evil man, for 
the intemperate man, for slaves, for free, for all ; 
that hope your rash and hasty hand would prostrate ; 
that hope my patience would advance." Have they 
done ? Are they answered ? 

There are other conditions and other laws of our 
nationality on which there needs to be said something 
if there were time. That it is not and that it cannot 
come to good, that it cannot achieve its destiny, that 
it cannot live even, unless it rests on the understand- 
ing of the State, you know. How gloriously this is 
anticipated by our own Constitution, you remember. 
How well said Washington — who said all things as 
he did all things, well — " that in proportion as gov- 
ernments rest on public opinion, that opinion must 
be enlightened." There must then be intelligence at 
the foundation. But what intelligence? Not that 
which puffeth up, I fancy, not flippancy, not smart- 
ness, not sciolism, whose fruits, whose expression are 



512 ADDRESS ON THE FOURTH OF JULY. 

vanity, restlessness, insubordination, hate, irrever- 
ence, unbelief, incapacity to combine ideas, and great 
capacity to overwork a single one. Not quite this. 
This is that little intelligence and little learning 
wliich are dangerous. These are the characteristics, 
I have read, which pave the way for the downfall of 
States ; not those on which a long glory and a long 
strength liave towered. These, more than the gen- 
eral of Macedon, gave the poison to Demosthenes in 
the Island Temple. These, not the triumvirate alone, 
closed the eloquent lips of Cicero. These, before 
the populous North had done it, spread beneath 
Gibraltar to the Libyan sands in the downward age. 
These, not Christianity, not Goth, not Lombard, nor 
Norman, rent that fair one Italy asunder, and turned 
the garden and the mistress of the earth into a school, 
into a hiding place, of assassins, — of spies from Aus- 
tria, of spies from France, with gold to buy and ears 
to catch and punish the dreams of liberty whispered 
in sleep, and shamed the memories and hopes of 
Machiavel and Mazzini, and gave for that joy and 
that beauty, mourning and heaviness. This is not 
the intelligence our Constitution means, Washington 
meant, and our country needs. It is intelligence 
which, however it begins, ends with belief, with 
humility, with obedience, with veneration, with admi- 
ration, with truth ; which recognizes and then learns 
and then teaches the duties of a comprehensive 
citizenship ; which hopes for a future on earth 
and beyond earth, but turns habitually, reverently, 
thoughtfully to the old paths, the great men, the 
hallowed graves of the fathers ; w^hich binds in one 
bundle of love the kindred and mighty legend of 



ADDEESS ON THE FOURTH OF JULY. 513 

revolution and liberty, the life of Christ in the Evan- 
gelists, and the Constitution in its plain text ; which 
can read \^ ith Lord Chatham, Thucydides and the 
stories of master States of antiquity, yet holds with 
him that the papers of the Congress of 1776 were 
better ; whose patriotism grows warm at Marathon, 
but warmer at Monmouth, at Yorktown, at Bunker 
Hill, at Saratoga ; which reforms by preserving, 
serves by standing and waiting, fears God and honors 
America. 

I had something to say more directly still on the 
ethics of nationalit}^, on the duty of instructing the 
conscience ; on the crimes of treason, and slander, 
and fraud, that are committed around us in its name ; 

^ on the shalloAvness and stupidity of tlie doctrine that 
the mere moral sentiments, trained by a mere moral 
discipline, may safely guide the complex civil life ; 
of the teachers and studies which they need to fit 
them for so precious, difficult, and delicate a domin- 
ion ; of the high place in the scale of duties, which, 
thus fitted, they assign to nationality ; of the judg- 
ment which, thus fitted, they would apply to one or 
two of the commonplaces and practices of the time. 
But T pass it all to say only that these ethics teach 
the true subordination, and the true reconciliation of 
apparently incompatible duties. These only are the 
casuists, or the safest casuists for us. Learn from 
them how to adjust this conflict between patriotism 
and philanthropy. To us, indeed, there seems to be 
no such conflict, for we are philanthropists in propor- 
tion as we are unionists. Our philanthropy, we 
venture, to say, is a just philanthropy. That is all. 

^ It loves all men, it helps all men, it respects all 

P 33 



514 ADDRESS ON THE FOURTH OF JULY. 

rights, keeps all compacts, recognizes all dangers, 
pities all suffering, ignores no fact, master and slave 
it enfolds alike. It happens thus that it contracts the 
sphere of our duty somewhat, and changes not the 
nature, but the time, the place, the mode of perform- 
ing it. It does not make our love cold, but it makes 
it safe ; it naturalizes it, it baptizes it into our life ; 
it circumscribes it within our capacities and our 
necessities ; it sets on it the great national public 
seal. If you say that thus our patriotism limits our 
philanthropy, I answer that ours is American philan- 
thropy. Be this the" virtue we boast, and this the 
name by which we know it. In this name, in this 
quality, find the standard and the utterance of the 
virtue itself. By this, not by broad phylacteries and 
chief seats, the keener hate, the gloomier fanaticism, 
the louder cr}^ judge, compare, subordinate. Do 
they think that nobody is a pliilanthropist but them- 
selves ? We, too, look up the long vista and gaze, 
rapt, at the dazzling ascent ; we, too, see towers 
rising, crowned, imperial, and the tribes coming to 
bend in the opening of a latter day. But we see 
peace, order, reconciliation of rights along that bright- 
ening future. We trace all along that succession of 
reform, the presiding instrumentalities of national 
life. We see our morality working itself clearer and 
clearer ; one historical and conventional right or 
wrong, after another, falling peacefully and still ; we 
hear the chain breaking, but there is no blood on it, 
none of his whom it bound, none of his who put it on 
him ; we hear the swelling chorus of the free, but 
master and slave unite in that chorus, and there is 
no discordant shriek above the harmonv : we see and 



ADDRESS ON THE FOURTH OF JULY. 515 

we hail the blending of our own glory with the 
eternal light of God, but we see, too, shapes of love 
and beauty ascending and descending there as in the 
old vision ! 

Hold fast this hope ; distrust the philanthropy, 
distrust the ethics which would, which must, turn it 
into shame. Do no evil that good may come. Per- 
form your share, for you have a share, in the abolition 
of slavery ; perform yotir share, for you have a share, 
in the noble and generous strife of the sections — 
but perform it by keeping, by transmitting, a united, 

LOVING, AND CHRISTIAN AMERICA. 

But why, at last, do I exhort, and Avhy do I seem 
to fear, on such a day as this? Is it not the nation's 
birthday? Is it not this country of our love and hopes, 
which celebrates it? This music of the glad march, 
these banners of pride and beauty, these memories so 
fragrant, these resolutions of patriotism so thought- 
ful, these hands pressed, these congratulations and 
huzzaings and tears, this great heart throbbing audi- 
bly^ — are they not hers, and do they not assure us ? 
These forests of masts, these singing workshops of 
labor, these fields and plantations whitening for the 
harvest, this peace and plenty, this sleeping thunder, 
these bolts in the closed, strong talon, do not they tell 
us of her health, her strength, and her future ? This 
shadow that flits across our grasses and is gone, this 
shallow ripple that darkens the surface of our broad 
and widening stream, and passes away, this little 
perturbation which our telescopes cannot find, and 
which our science can hardly find, but which we 
know cannot change the course or hasten the doom 
of one star ; have these any terror for us ? And He 



516 ADDRESS ON THE FOURTH OF JULY. 

who slumbers not, nor sleeps, who keeps watchfully 
the city of his love, on whose will the life of nations 
is suspended, and to whom all the shields of the 
earth belong, our fathers' God, is he not our God, 
and of whom, then, and of what shall we be afraid? 



SPEECH AT THE WEBSTER DINNER. 517 



SPEECH ON THE BHITHDAY OF DANIEL 
WEBSTER, JANUARY 18, 1859. 



[The seyenty-seventh anniversary of the birthday of Daniel 
"Webster was commemorated by a banquet at the Revere House. 
At the conclusion of the feast, and after the opening address by 
the president of the day, Hon. Caleb Gushing, Mr. Choate, 
being called upon, spoke as follows:] 

T WOULD not have it supposed for a moment that I 
design to make any eulogy, or any speech, concern- 
ing the great man whose birthday we have met to 
observe. I hasten to assure you that I shall attempt 
to do no such thing. There is no longer need of it, 
or fitness for it, for any purpose. Times have been 
when such a thing might have been done with pro- 
priety. While he was yet personally among us, — 
while he was yet walking in his strength in the paths 
or ascending the heights of active public life, or 
standing upon them, — and so many of the good and 
wise, so many of the wisest and best of our country, 
from all parts of it, thought he had title to the great 
office of our system, and would have had him for- 
mally presented for it, it was fit that those who 
loved and honored him should publicly — Avith ef- 
fort, with passion, with argument, with contention, 
— recall the series of his services, his life of elevated 



518 SPEECH AT THE WEBSTER DINNER. 

labors, finished and unfinished, display his large 
qualities of character and mind, and compare him, 
somewhat, in all these things, with the great men, 
his competitors for the great prize. Then was there 
a battle to be fought, and it was needful to fight it. 

And so, again, in a later day, while our hearts 
were yet bleeding vv^ith the sense of recent loss, and 
he lay newly dead in his chamber, and the bells were 
tolling, and his grave was open, and the sunlight of 
an autumn day was falling on that long funeral train, 
I do not sa}^ it was fit only, it was unavoidable, that 
we all, in some choked utterance and some imperfect, 
sincere expression, should, if we could not praise the 
patriot, lament the man. 

But these times have gone by. The race of honor 
and duty is for him all run. The high endeavor is 
made, and it is finished. The monument is builded. 
He is entered into his glory. The day of hope, of 
pride, of grief, has been followed by the long rest ; 
and the sentiments of grief, pride, and hope, are all 
merged in the sentiment of calm and implicit vener- 
ation. We have buried him in our hearts. That is 
enough to say. Our estimation of him is part of our 
creed. We have no argument to make or hear upon 
it. We enter into no dispute about him. We per- 
mit no longer any man to question us as to what he 
was, what he had done, how much we loved him, 
how much the country loved him, and how well he 
deserved it. We admire, we love, and we are still. 
Be this enough for us to say. 

Is it not enough that we just stand silent on the 
deck of the bark fast flying from the shore, and turn 
and see, as the line of coast disappears, and the head- 



SPEECH AT THE WEBSTER DINNER. 519 

lands and hills and all the land go down, and the 
islands are swallowed up, the great mountain stand- 
ing there in its strength and majesty, supreme and 
still — to see how it swells away up from the subject 
and fading vale ? to see that, though clouds and tem- 
pests, and the noise of waves, and the yelping of curs, 
may be at its feet, eternal sunshine has settled upon 
its head ? 

There is another reason why I should not trust 
myself to say much more of him to-night. It does 
so happen that j^ou cannot praise Mr. Webster for 
that which really characterized and identified him as 
a public man, but that you seem to be composing a 
tract for the times. 

It does so happen that the influence of his whole 
public life and position was so pronounced^ — so to 
speak, — so defined, sharp, salient ; the spirit of his 
mind, the tone of his mind, was so unmistakable and 
so peculiar ; the nature of the public man was so 
transparent and so recognized everywhere, — that 
you cannot speak of him without seeming to grow 
polemical, without seeming to make an attack upon 
other men, upon organizations, upon policy, upon 
tendencies. You cannot say of him what is true, and 
what you know to be true, but you are thought to be 
disparaging or refuting somebody else. 

In this way there comes to be mingled with our 
service of the heart something of the discordant, in- 
congruous, and temporary. So it is everywhere. 
They could not keep the birthday of Charles James 
Fox, but the}^ were supposed to attack the grave of 
Pitt, and aim at a Whig administration and a reform 
bill. An historian can hardly admire the architect- 



520 SPEECH AT THE WEBSTER DINNER. 

ure of the age of Pericles, or find some palliation of 
the trial of Socrates, but they say he is a Democrat, 
a Chartist, or a friend of the secret ballot. The mar- 
vellous eloquence, and noble, patriotic enterprise of 
our Everett, can scarcely escape such misconstruction 
of small jealousy. 

Yes ; sad it is, but true, that you cannot say here 
to-night what you think, what you know, what you 
thank God for, about the Union-loving heart, the 
Constitution-defending brain, the Qioderation-breath- 
ing spirit, the American nature of the great man, — 
our friend, — but they call out you are thinking of 
them ! So powerful is the suggestion of contrast, 
and such cowards does conscience make of all bad 
men ! 

I feel the effect of this embarrassment. I protest 
against such an application of any thing I say. But 
I feel, also, that it will be better than such a protest, 
to sum up, in the briefest and plainest and soberest 
expression, what I deem will be the record of his- 
tory, — let me hope, with the immunities of history, 
concerning this man, as a public man. 

He was, then, let me say, of the very foremost of 
great American Statesmen. This is the class of 
greatness in which he is to be ranked. As such, 
always, he is to be judged. What he would have 
been in another department of thought ; how high 
lie would have risen under other institutions ; what 
he could have done if politics had not turned him 
from calm philosophy aside ; whether he were reall}^ 
made for mankind, and to America gave up what was 
meant for mankind ; how his mere naked intellectual 
ability compared with this man's or that, — is a need- 
less and vain speculation. 



SPEECH AT THE WEBSTER DINNER. 521 

I may, however, be allowed to say that, although 
I have seen him act, and heard him speak, and give 
counsel, in very high and very sharp and difficult 
crises, I always felt that if more had been needed 
more would have been done, and that half his 
strength or all his strength he put not forth. I 
never saw him make what is called an effort without 
feeling that, let the occasion be what it would, he 
would have swelled out to its limits. There was 
always a reservoir of power of which you never 
sounded the depths, certainly never saw the bottom ; 
and I cannot well imagine any great historical and 
civil occasion to which he would not have brought, 
and to Avhich he would not be acknowledged to have 
brought, an adequate ability. He had wisdom to 
have guided the counsels of Austria as Metternich 
did, if he had loved absolutism as Avell ; skill enough 
and eloquence enough to have saved the life of Louis 
the Sixteenth, if skill and eloquence could have done 
it ; learning, services, character, and dignity enough 
for a Lord Chancellor of England, if wisdom in coun- 
sel and eloquence in debate would have been titles to 
so proud a distinction. 

But his class is that of American Statesmen. In 
that class he is to find his true magnitude. As he 
stood there he is to take his place for ever in our 
system. To that constellation he has gone up, to 
that our telescopes or our naked eye are to be di- 
rected, and there I think he shines with a large and 
unalterable glory. 

In every work regard the writer's end. In every 
life regard the actor's end. 

In saying this I do not mean to ignore or disparage 



622 SPEECH AT THE WEBSTER DINNER. 

his rank, also, in the profession of the law. In that 
profession he labored, by that he lived, of that he 
was proud, to that he brought vast ability and ex 
quisite judgment, and in that he rose at last to the 
leadership of the bar. But I regard that, rather, as a 
superinduced, collateral, accessional fame, a necessity 
of greatness, — a transcendent greatness, certainly ; 
but it was not the labor he most loved, it was not 
the fame which attracts so many pilgrims to his 
tomb, and stirs so many hearts when his name is 
sounded. There have been Bacons, and Clarendons, 
and one Cicero, and one Demosthenes, who were 
lawyers. But they are not the Bacons, the Claren- 
dons, they are not the Cicero and the Demosthenes 
of historical fame. 

It is a noble and a useful profession ; but it was 
not large enough for the whole of Webster. 

In that class, then, let me say next, — which is the 
class of American statesmen, — of foremost American 
statesmen, — it happened to him to be thrown on our 
third American age. This ever must be regarded 
when we would do him justice, or understand him, 
or compare him with others. 

It is easy to say and to see that, if his lot had made 
him a member of the Revolutionary Congress, he 
would have stood by the side of Washington and 
Jefferson, Adams and Chase, and that from his 
tongue, too. Independence would have thundered. 
It is easy to say and see that it would not have been 
that his lips were frozen and his arm palsied ; that 
the cabals of Gates, of Conway, could have gone un- 
detected there ; that a foolish fear of long enlistments 
would have delayed the great strife ; that so many 



SPEECH AT THE WEBSTER DINNER. 523 

retreats, pinched winter-quarters, blood traced on the 
snow by the naked feet of bleeding men, would have 
proved that the want of funds and the fear of un- 
popularity were too strong for the sentiment of 
Liberty ! 

It is easy to say, too, and to see that if he had 
been thrown on the constitutional age he would have 
been found with Hamilton, Jay, and Madison ; that 
his pen, too, and his tongue would have leaped to 
impress that generation with the nature and neces- 
sity of that great work ; that he would have risen to 
the utmost height of the great argument, and that 
on the pillars, on the foundation-stones of that Con- 
stitution which he first read on the little pocket- 
handkerchief, his name, his wisdom, too, would now 
be found chiselled deeply. But he was cast on the 
third age of our history, and how was his part acted 
there ? 

In this class, then, let me say further, of the fore- 
most of great American statesmen, I say there was 
never one, of any one of our periods, — I shall not 
except the highest of the first period, — of a more 
ardent love of our America^ and of the whole of it; 
of a truer, deeper, broader sense of what the Fare- 
well Address calls the Unity of Government, — its 
nature, spring, necessity, — and the means of secur- 
ing it ; or who said more, and did more to sink it 
deep in the American heart. Of the relations of the 
States to our system, — of their powers, their rights, 
their quasi sovereignty, — he said less, not because 
he thought less or knew less, but because he saw 
there was less necessity for it. But the Union, the 
Constitution, the national federal life, the American 



524 SPEECH AT THE WEBSTER DINNER. 

name, — E Phirihus Unnm, — these filled his heart, 
these dwelt in his habitual speech. 

This, I think, exactly, was his specialty. To this 
master passion and master sentiment his whole life 
was subordinated carefull}^ He was totus in illis. 
He began his public course in opposition to the party 
which had the general government; and he dearly 
loved New England ; but he " had nothing to do with 
the Hartford Convention." He drew his first breath 
in a Northern State and a Northern region ; his opin- 
ions were shaped and colored by that birthplace and 
by that place of residence ; the local interests he 
powerfull}' advocated ; for that advocacy he has even 
been taunted and distrusted. But it was because he 
thought he saw, and just so far as he saw, that the 
local interest was identical with the national interest, 
and that that advocacy was advocacy for the whole, 
and that policy was American policy, that he es- 
poused it. 

Some aged clergj-man has been reported to have 
said, that the sermon — whatever the theology, what- 
ever the ability — was essentially defective, if it 
did not leave on the hearer the impression that 
the preacher loved his soul, and that God and the 
Saviour loved it. I never heard him make a speech, 
— a great speech, — wdiatever were the topic, or 
the time, that did not leave the impression that 
he loved nothing, desired nothing, so much as the 
good and glory of America ; that he knew no North 
and no South ; that he did not seem to summon 
around him the whole brotherhood of States and 
men, and hold them all to his heart ! This gave 
freshness and energy to all his speech. This set the 



SPEECH AT THE WEBSTER DINNER. 625 

tune to the universal harmony. Even his studies 
revealed this passion. He knew American history 
by heart, as a statesman, not as an antiquary, should 
know it ; the plain, noble men, the high aims, and 
hard fortunes of the colonial time ; the agony and 
the glory of the Revolutionary War, and of the age 
of the Constitution, were all familiar to him ; but 
chiefly he loved to mark how the spirit of national 
life was evolving itself all the while ; how the colo- 
nies grew to regard one another as the children of 
the same mother, and therefore fraternally ; how the 
common danger, the common oppression, of the ante- 
revolutionary and revolutionary period served to fuse 
them into one ; how the Constitution made them 
formally one ; and how the grand and sweet and 
imperial sentiment of a united national life came at 
last to penetrate and warm that whole vast and 
various mass, and move it as a soul. 

" Spiritus intus alit, totamque infusa per artus 
Mens agitat molem, et niagno se corpore miscet." 

In this master sentiment I fiyid the key to all his 
earlier and all his later policy and opinions. Through 
his whole lifetime, this is the central principle that 
runs through all, accounts for all, reconciles all. 

In the department of a mere adventurous and 
originating policy, I do not think he desired to dis- 
tinguish himself. In the department of a restless 
and arrogant and clamorous reform, I know he did 
not wish to distinguish himself. The general ten- 
dency of his mind, the general scope of his politics, 
were towards conservation. 

This rested on a deep conviction that, if the gov- 
ernment continued to exist, and this national life 



52G SPEECH AT THE WEBSTER DINNER. 

continued to be kept, and if these States were held 
in peace together, the growth of it, the splendid 
future of it, were as certain as the courses of the 
seasons. He thought it wiser, therefore, always, that 
we should grow great under the Union, than that we 
should be forced to grow great b}^ legislation. He 
thought it wiser, therefore, at first, — local opinion 
may have, or may not have, a little influenced this, 
— to let America grow into a manufacturing people, 
than that she should be forced to become so. But 
when that policy was adopted, and millions had been 
invested under it, and a vast, delicate, and precious 
interest had grown up, then it seemed to him that 
just so much had been added to our American life, 
that for so much we had gone forward in our giant 
course, and he would guard it and keep it. 

He did not favor a premature and unprincipled 
expansion of territory ; though he saw and rejoiced 
to see, if America continued just, and continued 
brave, and the Union lasted, how widely — to what 
Pacific and tropic seas — she must spread, — and how 
conspicuous a fame of extent was spread out before 
her. But when the annexation was made and the 
line drawn and the treaty signed, then he went for 
her, however "butted and bounded ; " then he kept 
steady to the compact of annexation ; then there was 
no date so small, no line so remote, that he would 
not plant on it the ensign all radiant, that no foreign 
aggression might come ! Here you have the Webster- 
ianism of Webster. 

I cannot trace this great central principle and this 
master sentiment and trait which is the characteristic 
of his whole politics, through the last years of his life, 



SPEECH AT THE WEBSTER DINNER. 527 

without awakening feelings, some feelings unsuited 
to the time. I believe, you believe, the country and 
history will believe, that all he said and all he did, he 
said and did out of a " full heart for the Constitu- 
tion," and that the '' austere glory " of that crisis of 
his America and of himself will shine his brightest 
glory. When some years have passed away, if not 
yet, that civil courage, that wisdom which combines, 
constructs, and reconciles ; which discerns that in the 
political world, in our political world especially, no 
theory and no idea may be pressed to its extreme, 
and that common sense, good temper, good nature, 
and not the pedantry of logical abstraction, and the 
clamor of intemperate sectional partisanships, are the 
true guides of life ; and that deemed a gloomy fool- 
ishness, refuted by our whole history, that because 
in this cluster of States there are different institu- 
tions, a different type of industry, different moral 
estimates, they cannot live together and grow togetlier 
to a common nationality by forbearance and reason ; 
that an honest, just, and well-principled patriotism 
is a higher moral virtue than a virulent and noisy 
philanthropy ; and that to build and keep this nation 
is the true way to serve God and serve man, — these 
traits and these opinions will be remembered as the 
noblest specimen of the genius and wisdom of Web- 
ster. Better than any other passage, or any other 
catastrophe, these will be thought most happily to 
have " concluded the great epic of his life." I refer 
you for them all to his immortal volumes ; lasting as 
the granite of our mountains, lasting as the pillars of 
our capitol and our Constitution. 

They say he was ambitious ! Yes ; as Ames said 



528 SPEECH AT THE WEBSTER DINNER. 

of Hamilton, "there is no doubt that he desired 
glory ; and that, feeling his own force, he longed to 
deck his brow with the wreath of immortality." But 
I believe lie would have yielded his arm, his frame to 
be burned, before lie would have sought to grasp the 
highest prize of earth by any means, by any organi- 
zation, by any tactics, by any speech, which in the 
least degree endangered the harmony of the system. 

They say, too, he loved New England ! He loved 
New Hampshire — that old granite world — the crys- 
tal hills, gray and cloud-topped; the river, whose 
murmur lulled his cradle ; the old hearth-stone ; the 
grave of father and mother. He loved Massachusetts, 
which adopted and honored him — that sounding sea- 
shore, that charmed elm-tree seat, that reclaimed 
farm, that choice herd, that smell of earth, that dear 
library, those dearer friends ; but the " sphere of his 
duties was his true country." Dearly he loved you, 
for he was grateful for the open arms with which you 
welcomed the stranger and sent him onwards and 
upwards. 

But when the crisis came, and the winds were all 
let loose, and that sea of March " wrought and was 
tempestuous," then you saw that he knew even you 
only as you were, American citizens ; then you saw 
him rise to the true nature and stature of American 
citizenship ; then you read on his brow only what he 
thought of the whole Republic; then you saw him 
fold the robes of his habitual patriotism around him, 
and counsel for all — for all. 

So then he served you — " to be pleased with his 
service was your affair, not his." 

And now what would he do, what would he be if 



SPEECH AT THE WEBSTER DINNER. 529 

he were here to-day ? I do not presume to know. 
But what a loss we have in him. 

I have read that in some hard battle, when the tide 
was running against him, and his ranks were break- 
ing, some one in the agony of a need of generalship 
exclaimed, '' Oh for an hour of Dundee ! " 

So say I, Oh for an hour of Webster now ! 

Oh for one more roll of that thunder inimitable ! 

One more peal of that clarion ! 

One more grave and bold counsel of moderation ! 

One more throb of American feeling ! 

One more Farewell Address ! And then might he 
ascend unhindered to the bosom of his Father and liis 
God. 

But this is a vain wish, and I can only offer you 
this sentiment — 

The birthday of Webster — then best, then only 
well celebrated — when it is given as he gave that 
marvellous brain, that large heart, and that glorious 
life, to our country, our whole country, our united 
country. 



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